An excerpt from the Autodesk article “Balancing the risks and rewards of innovation in engineering and manufacturing” by Zach Mortice:
Innovation in any field, especially in fast-moving industries like tech or product design, comes with inherent risk—and the potential for great reward. For every game changer like the iPhone there are many more flops like Google Glass.
For Jonathan Brill, entrepreneur and futurist, innovation is finding ways to make old systems do new things. “Innovation is risk-taking,” he says. “You are adding volatility to a system by trying to change it. You are creating a thing that does not exist in the world and trying to do things that will allow it to scale in a sustainable way.”
His book Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Organization to Survive and Profit from Radical Change focuses on how to future-proof business, capitalizing on social, technological, and economic trends to turn threats into opportunities. A veteran of the product design and engineering industry, he says that this field of the economy is more likely than many to hunker down against these rogue waves instead of trying to harness their potentially destructive—but also productive—power.
