Staff writer Teresa Murphy-Skvorzova shares her perspective on innovation.

As a participant in the World Summit on the Information Society Forum (WSIS Forum) in 2012, I remember being part of a workshop that posed the following question:

“Imagine the year is 2050. Today is the 25th anniversary of a breakthrough innovation that happened in 2025. What was it? How did it change the world as we knew it then and set the stage for the next 25 years?”

My group thought that the major innovation would be a technology that could receive, translate and transmit brain waves—that it would be possible for someone to think about sending a message to someone else, for example, and the other person would automatically receive it. I also recall a corollary discussion on the extra security required for this—otherwise your brain would be hacked!

What am I getting at?

Today is the first day of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and many people are asking a similar question about innovation—what is the next wave going to be? But we aren’t talking about 2025, we want to know the here and now—what is the “Next Great Thing” for today, at the start of 2014. Here is a very brief outlook on some potential candidates:

  1.  The Internet of Things—Connect your phone to your stove to your fire alarm to your security system to your computer to your lights to your water heater …...
  2.  3D printing—once the materials develop, then your shirt or sweater might be 3D printed.
  3.  Curved Electronics—from a technological point of view, this is indeed impressive. From the perspective of consumers, it might not have as strong an appeal.
  4. Wearable Technology—what do you think about various gadgets telling you your schedule in your ear, teaching you to run effectively, letting you have a hands free phone on a headband?
  5. Thoughts? Well, the “Next Great Thing” has to have several properties to be truly “great”. It has to be flexible, it has to appeal to a whole bunch of different people, and it has to add a disproportionate amount of value compared to the increased cost. Personally, of the four tech groups above, I think 3D printing is the closest to being the center of the next wave of innovation, as it is the most flexible and allows the consumer to choose how to use the technology. To some extent, a 3D printer is like Google—a tool to reach other goals. One doesn’t use a 3D printer for the sake of using a 3D printer, but it is an avenue to enabling many other projects. Similarly, “consumer electronic components” are a close runner-up, in that modular components add the power of computing to self-defined projects.All in all, the “Next Great Thing” doesn’t have to be innovative so much as it has to be the catalyst of more innovation.

Eduporium is working on including as many creative and innovative technologies in our store catalog as possible, such as 3D printers and modular electronic components such as littleBits and Arduino. Get these and other amazing products from Eduporium, and stay tuned for more!