Malvern, PA, December 10, 2014 – The coming years will see the stark emergence of a growing trend: technology-centric innovation outpacing human cognitive capacity and institutional adaptability.
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In a nutshell: Digital technology is advancing at an exponential rate, while humans and institutions built by humans adapt in a linear fashion. That’s why they struggle to cope with increasingly complex new technology and take a long time to tap its full promise. This people problem will only worsen as technology continues to accelerate. Thus, a new approach to innovation is sorely needed, Ricoh Americas Corporation stated today in its third annual end-of-the-year look to the future.
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In an increasingly digital world, major technologies advance at a rate that parallels Moore’s Law, which observes that integrated circuit density (i.e., processing power) doubles every 18 months. While it took 8,000 years to get from agriculture to the light bulb, it’s taken less than a century to move from the light bulb to landing on the moon, the World Wide Web and the sequencing of the human genome. As technology reaches ever more advanced levels, each doubling causes a big jump in complexity. Humans and human-created institutions like governments and businesses evolve and adapt at a much slower pace, and the gap between their abilities to absorb new capabilities versus the ever-growing capabilities offered by technology will widen rapidly in the years ahead, says Ricoh.
We subconsciously understand these limits. In fact, three out of five Americans (62 percent) go so far as to say they doubt “technology has made Americans any smarter,” according to a Ricoh Americas Corporation survey(1).
“We need fresh approaches to dealing with the exponential pace of technology development and the gap versus our natural ability to adapt to it in a useful manner,” said Nikhil Balram, President and CEO of Ricoh Innovations Corporation and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, UC-Berkeley and IIT-Gandhinagar. “The solution is what we at Ricoh call Deep Innovation – an approach in which the development of new technology is firmly grounded within the context of people and business from the start to finish. Today too often, the human context for the latest technology innovation is added as an afterthought.”
Here are some examples of areas in which a Deep Innovation approach could be beneficial:
• Social media – Companies urge employees to engage their social communities, but every day we see this backfire. (And nothing has replaced in-person interaction: 4 out of 5 adults – 79 percent – would rather have a cup of coffee with a co-worker than chat online with them(2).)
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• BYOD – Companies let employees use their own smartphones and tablets, but these devices are creating havoc on enterprise networks. Since personal data abounds on these devices, companies can’t probe them for security risks as they could if the devices were company-issued.
• Information sharing – The economy hinges on sharing knowledge, and technology has made it startlingly easy … which also eases intellectual property theft. How does a company simultaneously expand and constrain information access?
• Perpetual data – Data storage density has been growing exponentially for the past two decades and has reached a level at which the perpetual retention of all information is contemplated. This perpetual memory is a triumph of technology but very troublesome in the context of the natural human right and condition for mistakes and mishaps to eventually be forgotten. The “right to be forgotten” through the deliberate deletion of “irrelevant” data is being argued in court in landmark cases in Europe and other parts of the world.
• Tele-health – The remote delivery of healthcare is an old concept becoming more mainstream via the advancement of technology in the form of ubiquitous connectivity, high-performance processing, and high-capacity cloud services and storage. However, to make it really work effectively for the benefit of the patient and the healthcare provider, the technology needs to be presented and implemented in a way that invisibly aligns with how they think and operate.
“Ricoh has put its finger on an important hidden dynamic in our culture,” said Vivek Wadhwa, Fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, and Distinguished Fellow at Singularity University. “On the surface, it appears that we humans are controlling our technology, and of course we are in one respect. But in another, the technology we create is taking us places, good and bad, that we can neither envision nor control. The business and human contexts that are the pillars of Deep Innovation are absolutely essential to achieving good outcomes. We don’t pay enough attention to them, and I agree with Ricoh that we should.”
Ricoh’s commitment
“At Ricoh, we’re committed to the concept of Deep Innovation because it affirms our mission of providing human-oriented services, not just technologies, to our customers,” said Terrie Campbell, Vice President, Strategic Marketing, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “Deep Innovation will also help us deliver information mobility, the ability for organizations to bring the right information to the right user at the right time in the right form to achieve the strongest possible business results.”
Ricoh today pledged to continue pushing the boundaries of Deep Innovation in the design of its business solutions and the technologies they comprise. For more on Deep Innovation, visit http://www.ric.ricoh.com/infinite-network.
The survey was conducted online in the U.S. in August, 2014 among 2,014 adults ages 18 and older by Harris Poll on behalf of Ricoh of whom 1,034 are employed full time, part time, or self-employed.
For details on Ricoh’s full line of products, services and solutions, please visit www.ricoh-usa.com.
(1)Survey conducted by Harris Poll in August on behalf of Ricoh.
(2)Survey conducted by Harris Poll in August on behalf of Ricoh.
| About Ricoh |
Ricoh is a global technology company specializing in office imaging equipment, production print solutions, document management systems and IT services. Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group operates in about 200 countries and regions. In the financial year ending March 2014, Ricoh Group had worldwide sales of 2,195 billion yen based on the IFRS accounting standard (approx. 21.3 billion USD).
The majority of the company’s revenue comes from products, solutions and services that improve the interaction between people and information. Ricoh also produces award-winning digital cameras and specialized industrial products. It is known for the quality of its technology, the exceptional standard of its customer service and sustainability initiatives.
Under its corporate tagline, imagine. change. Ricoh helps companies transform the way they work and harness the collective imagination of their employees.
For further information, please visit www.ricoh.com/about/.
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