Yes, human gene editing is happening now. Researchers in China have just reported editing the genes of human embryos to make them resistant to HIV infection. Last year, another China-based team announced they had modified a gene related to a blood disease. In both cases, research teams say ‘this is for a good cause…’

What is the next step now that we can do almost anything? Where should we draw the line?

To be honest, I don’t know yet what to think. Science goes faster than human ethics. Should we stop this? Should we allow human gene editing for very specific purposes related to eradicating diseases? Or should we leave the door open and craft super-humans?

I just launched a survey on Twitter, asking where we should draw the line…

1700 persons responded to the survey over the week end, which is a sign that the topic is of interest!

With 1700 respondents, there is a fair chance that this is a somewhat representative sample, so I am sharing the outcome with you:

- 24% of respondents think we should not do human gene editing at all.

- 37” of respondents think that we should restrict it to ad hoc cure or disease eradication.

- And 38% opted for ‘super-human.’

For some reason, I thought (or hoped?) that most of us would not draw the line that far…

What do you think? Would you opt for ‘super-human?’

If yes, is that because you’d enjoy to be a super-human yourself, think this would be a good thing for your kids, or maybe because you assume it will be impossible to draw any line anyway? Another argument I heard is that we will have to engineer ourselves anyway, because medical progress in the past two centuries has been such that we have started to slow down Darwin natural selection…

Two big things are happening while you are reading these lines in March 2016: the rise of populism in the United States… and the victory of a machine vs the best GO human player.

Both are fascinating and question our future…

Populism is not a new thing. We have seen this for centuries: if you want to be elected, tell people a scary story, let fear grow in their mind, and provide the most simplistic answers. When scared, we react with our ‘croc’ brain and stop thinking. Then comes violence, as it happened last Friday in Chicago.

There are two risks here: ending up with a dictator in power (low probability, hopefully, in the short term), and, perhaps more importantly, weakening Democracy and the Republic for lack of a real alternative. We may have to reinvent the way we make collective decisions for Society. This will require a great deal of Vision and Leadership.

The other big thing happening now is that Artificial Intelligence is becoming real. I’m not talking about gadgets. I realized this deep in my mind, my heart, and my guts when seeing a machine beat the best GO human player.

I have been a GO amateur for 30 years, and have always considered this 2500 year old game as the greatest game invented by mankind.

GO is much more complex and versatile than Chess, with the beauty of combining the simplest rules you can imagine with infinite variations. When you play GO, you play with your hands, your eyes, and your mind at the same time.

Last Friday, a machine (AlphaGo, designed by Google) beat the best GO human player for the third time in a row. This happened in Seoul, Korea. The 37th move in the game was the turn point. Lee Sedol, the human champion, stood up and left the match room. He did not understand. When he came back, it took him a long moment to get back to the game. The machine had done something that did not make sense. Then, over the next 3 hours, the machine went on to win the game.

At first, Fan Hui, another GO champion who had been working with Google for months, thought that move 37 was rather odd. “It’s not a human move. I have never seen a human play this move,” Fan Hui said. “So beautiful.” And he kept repeating. Beautiful. Beautiful. Fan Hui was fascinated. He realized that the machine had ‘seen’ something nobody could envision.

The way AlphaGo has been designed is noteworthy. As the variations in GO are virtually infinite, it does not make sense for computer scientists to apply the same logic as in Chess: exploring all variations through the end of the game would take an eternity. So the trick is to mimic the human brain, and make AlphaGo just a little smarter: if the best human players are able to project the game 15 moves out, let’s design AlphaGo so that it can project the game 20 moves out. Now, the beauty lies also in how you evaluate the ‘projection’. This is like a visual design thing by which you assess your overall position.

The machine sees and thinks through GO moves almost like a human. It is just smarter to envision a deeper future. This proximity also makes the machine a great teacher: Fan Hui dramatically improved his game in the past few months. Both Lee Sedol and Fan Hui are fascinated, and somewhat sad to realize that they will most probably never be able to beat the machine, ever.

I personally thought that GO was an Art. Either I was wrong, or the machine has become an artist…

Now, I can’t help connecting the dots between what is happening in politics and the exponential progress taking place in AI. If charismatic populists can fool the crowds, what could a very smart machine achieve in 2024? This is not a joke.

How many times have you heard: “We have to reinvent our Customers’ Path to Purchase?”

Well, yes there is something to be reinvented, but I would argue you should simply forget the notion of a “Path to Purchase.”

Depending on your category, the game you ought to play is Water or Fire…

Does your category still engage customers? Do you hear passionate conversations about new product launches?

If the answer is no, you might think of reinventing your category in the first place… Or, if you can’t make it, morph into a utility, like water from the tap. Tap water does not have to be branded to sell and be used, it just has to flow. For low engagement categories (e.g. electricity, batteries, bulbs, detergent, butter, sugar, etc.), the winners will be those who can make the ‘flow’ happen and take the consumer decision out of the equation. Forget path to purchase, and focus on making the path to usage frictionless. The answer is not necessarily easy… but digital can help!

On the other end, if your category is hot in street conversations and social media (e.g. fashion, beauty, cars, smartphones, gourmet food, etc.), you’d better be a Love Brand! Lukewarm brands will not survive in Fire categories. In this case, shift your focus from path to purchase to what will trigger and entertain Love with your customers! Who are you as a Brand? Do you have a real personality? Do you count your own employees in your Fan Club? Change your metrics: measure engagement and passion for your Brand before anything else. Here again, digital can help if you do your Love homework!

So, are you in the Water or in the Fire game?

Have you heard of Magic Leap?

This Augmented Reality startup has just raised $793.5 million in a Series C round of funding involving Alibaba, Google, Warner Bros, Qualcomm Ventures, and some other investors.

So Magic Leap is being valued $4.5B… before having released a single product in the market.

When you think about it, Augmented Reality (VR) is going to be a much bigger thing than Virtual Reality (AR).

AR is about blending reality with digital projections. Imagine talking to and playing with a hologram. There you are. That’s AR. As AR can blend with reality, the potential applications are infinite!

Education: your kids will soon hear and see Plato, Albert Einstein, Shakespeare, or George Washington. They will enjoy personal lessons at home from their favorite teachers who will show them how the solar system works.

Health services: your doctor (real or AI…) will teleport-hologram in your home, show you which organ needs help, and how a custom drug is actually working on your cells.

Shopping: eCommerce is dead, long live aCommerce! Augmented Commerce will blend the best of in-store experience with the practicality of online shopping. Imagine walking the aisles of your favorite specialty store… in your living room; or accessing the long tail of a million skus next to the real shelf.

In a nutshell, the addressable market for Augmented Reality is virtually 100% of your time. Everything you can do with your fingers on a smartphone, you will be able to do with your eyes or ears in AR.

Another reason why Augmented Reality is going to be huge is that it plays at the very heart of your experience and emotions.

Some may say: ‘Danger! Where will this lead us?” Sure, we have to be careful. But when you think about it, the Italian genius who invented eye glasses in the 13th Century was working on AR too, right? :-)

So what is the projected AR market size? I hear $120B by 2020. I’d say this is on the conservative side…

You have probably heard a number of times that innovation is the outcome of ‘a great idea + great execution + great team.’

Easier said than done.

When you look for the underlying drivers, it becomes more interesting and actionable.

The ‘great idea’ part is not necessarily the most challenging, so much so that the best recipe for great ideas is confrontation and sharing… you could say ‘stealing’! Share your ideas with others, ask for feedback, and do not hesitate to enrich them with others’ ideas. To be relevant and fresh, ideas must be exposed outside, not kept in a safe!

A hundred people will end up having the same idea. The question is who is going to execute best. So what about execution?

What drives success in execution is a team with high self-confidence in their ability to make it, a shared commitment on measurable goals with tight constraints — both time and $ — and freedom on how to operate. It is amazing what you can achieve when you relentlessly stick to your objective and just focus on the ‘how’, without trying to or thinking of negotiating the ‘what’. This is when you become real creative!

Another big driver for success in execution is competition. People are wired to compete, and perform best when they compete. No wonder start-up teams are more energized. The sense of competition gets lost in large organizations, where people compete to get promoted, not necessarily to deliver and hit the market. So, for those innovation goals that are really strategic to you, I would argue it’s worth having multiple teams competing together — even if they belong to the same corporation. The motivation effect is way greater than the supposedly waste of resource with overlaps. Xprize proves every day that competition can make the impossible possible, with very limited financial resources. The main resource is in your mind.

So what about the great team? Experience tells us that, if talent matters, diversity and motivation matter even more. Ivy League pedigree is not a must for a great innovative team. You need a leader, diverse profiles to stimulate confrontation, and the ability to crowd source external resources.

I am sure you have experienced some or many of the above drivers of innovation. Welcome to share!

Is this provocative?

Possibly a bit… but nonetheless true!

You can innovate without doing R&D… and you can do R&D without innovating much. So what is this about?

Let’s start with innovation. ‘In-novare’ literally means ‘renew the inside’, i.e. change the core. It is focused on designing a ‘new core’ for a user. It is user-centric by design: the only thing pre-existing is the user. Innovation requires listening skills, imagination, and willingness to experiment — not necessarily scale or massive resources. Innovation does not necessarily imply technology. Inventing a new recipe in your kitchen is innovation!

R&D is a very different animal, or animals we should say.

The ‘R’ part of it is meant to explore new scientific and/or technology areas. It is not necessarily user-centric, and it is not necessarily meant to deliver potential solutions. Just insights, that may or may not be practical.

The ‘D’ part of it is meant to develop a product or service once the concept has been defined. It is a delivery process in a project mode. The vast majority of products and services developed are renovations, not innovations, in the sense that they upgrade previous solutions without ‘changing the core’.

How the ‘R’ and ‘D’ got married in organizations is a mystery… considering how different they are. The only similarity is that they often both take place in Labs with guys wearing a white coat.

Also, aggregating ‘R’ and ‘D’ sometimes enables to hide how little we invest in ‘R’ vs ‘D’…

All this being said, what is the point we are trying to make?

- Don’t confuse Innovation with R and/or D.

- You don’t need plenty of resources to innovate. You may not even need technology.

- On the other end, it’s not because you do R and/or D that you will innovate.

- It is definitely worth trying to bring an innovative spirit into R and D… but this will not do the trick!

- If you focus talents on innovation, keep them independent from your R and D: they can propose things that may not require R and D, and also help brief R and D in a better way.

- If you are in Government, it is not because you create tax advantages for companies spending more in R&D that the entire country will innovate more… You may think of stimulating Universities and Incubators to foster an innovation-friendly environment for talents.

Your perspective is welcome!