FDA reform, and there are those who want to tear down the patents where the United States is winning in this field.
4. Merger of the ‘Cloud’ Computing and Mobile Devices. These innovations are already here, and saying it is important is almost cliché, but the idea of a PC is becoming more and more distant as one can access immense centralized computing power and information anywhere and anytime. The productivity increases and the decentralization of the ability to mine data will create huge productivity gains everywhere, from the consumer sector to medicine, to the industrial sector. Driving data access to users 24/7 will enable all of us to stay connected, stay healthier, and will continue to provide tension to marriages across the globe.
5. In-Vivo Cell Potentiation. Recent discoveries in stem cell biology and the new field of epigenetics have unlocked the ability to design drugs that can be delivered to the body and can cause cells in the body to change. Some call this “transdifferentiation,” but basically it is using drugs to trigger the body’s own ability to cure itself using our own cells, not cells from a petri dish. Melanoma cells can be given signals to change into normal skin cells. Soon we will be able to tell the body to grow more new heart tissue, to grow new pancreas cells to cure diabetes, and even to fix our own bones faster. Someday we may be able to cause regeneration of limbs and organs. If you do not believe me, ponder this—if a human infant’s finger is severed at the first joint before 3 months of age, it will grow back normally, just like a newt’s tail. After that, it won’t grow back at all. The genes are just dormant, ready to be awakened by the right signal.
Bonus Trend (to be ignored at our peril): China. Despite predictions to the contrary, the United States will remain the global force in fundamental innovation in the next decade, and will increase its lead over Europe. I am not talking number of patents-but fundamental discoveries that will change the world. China will be the exception—they will make strides in their own internal innovation. Some of the best and brightest are returning to China, and it is actually becoming much easier to start companies there. Their government seems to be making innovation easier and ours seems intent on making it harder (in spite of good intentions). While the United States total research funding will still dwarf the rest of the world and our lead in interdisciplinary technology and fundamental innovation will survive, our peril is in applications development and deployment. We will invent 90 percent of the clean-tech innovations that matter, but we have already lost the thin-film solar market to China and Europe because we could not fund it, scale it and had no domestic market development. We lost to China and the EU even though their solar industry is mostly based on technology from the United States.
Innovation is one area where we can be proud. These five innovations are the tip of the iceberg. Let us hope our policy makers can hear our pleas and enhance, not penalize the infrastructure that will drive these inventions of the next decade and beyond.
[Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of posts from Xconomists and other technology leaders from around the country who are weighing in with the Top 5 innovations they’ve seen in their respective fields the past 10 years, or the Top 5 disruptive technologies that will impact the next decade.]
