‘We Have; Therefore We Will’ - Innovation in a Fifth Dimension

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Business, Education, Technology

Descartes’ ‘I think; therefore I am,’ will be surpassed by ‘We have; therefore we will’ – our capacity for assessing reality is heading for a quantum leap.

Descartes teased our perception of reality, our sense of purpose, and for most of the year we don’t bother to think too much about what makes us tick. Come warmer days, our internal body clock, the circadian cycle, adjusts. With it, our sense of space and time shifts and collides, we daydream more. Our perception of space and time alters with age and temperature, and our emotive behaviour responds quickly, dramatically, to neural triggers of image and verse – in its basic form, it’s advertising.

Since the driven Mad Men of Manhattan’s 50’s advertising circuit, we have come a long way. Today, we are engineering a new perceptive reality – a five dimensional visual presentation which will challenge linear innovation models.

As part of Grant Thornton’s partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit a substantial programme of short video interviews has been compiled, week-by-week they are added to the Grant Thornton Blog space. This week, Professor David Gann explains, in brief, some of the thinking behind 5-D innovation modelling – there are some things you should not miss, the link is at the end of this article. Gann is involved with global research and design groups, principally at London’s Imperial College; he is at the forefront of critical thinking which will deliver the next generation of planning and decision-making tools.

If you don’t remember a world without Auto-CAD, think about a world without Auto-CAD. Auto-CAD and its family of 3-D modelling tools accelerate our reality. 5-D will really rock your processing power. This new form of data processing will impact global decision-making at corporate and governmental levels; not that there’s the width of a bailed-out dollar between the two sectors these days.

To understand the importance of this quantitative and qualitative shift in information management, consider the realm of Arabic philosopher Avicenna’s floating man experiment. Avicenna asked: if a man, suspended in mid-air, his eyes closed, with no part of his body touching another part – his hands and toes splayed – is conscious of his environment only by what he perceives in that limited state; he concludes that self is not logically dependent on any physical thing – a concept at the core of marketing and product development.

In essence, the floating man perceives dimensions beyond the 3-D. Until now, mankind has not been able to harness these sensory dimensions in a framework suitable for forecasting and modelling. Let’s not pretend that the dawn of a Minority Report age is upon us, but the seeds of a new information revolution are sprouting.

Posted on this Blog last week is a short presentation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s TED lab - it is the next big thing - and though it is not 5-D modelling, we can clearly see how the application of a new generation of data networks will provide an altered digital reality.

The almost intuitive visualisation tools presented by TED are dependent on data collation. This world is no longer short of data. Bloomberg’s multi-channel data service for example, used globally by stockbrokers, is a primitive predecessor of the 5-D modelling system. Bloomberg standardises a huge library of global economic, financial and social data in a way that can be mapped and compared.

Grafting TED’s eyes and ears with a Bloomberg-style memory will lead to a new breed of visualised decision-making platforms. It will not be limited to financial or architectural sectors, but will be used by businesses and governments to predict the outcome of innovation and policy decisions.

As unemployment rises in Germany and Eastern Europe, deprived districts register a rise in right-wing sentiment. Is it a coincidence that as Ireland faces it’s worst economic conditions for a generation, militant republicans edge forward with violent protest? So, picture IMF Chairman Gordon Brown at the 2019 G25 meeting. By his side is the European Union’s first president, Nicolas Sarkozy. As they discuss the need for entrepreneurship, a high-definition hologram displays in the conference centre.

At the conference, Sarkozy proposes reducing the EU’s budgetary support for innovation by 5% and a visualisation of the consequences plays for the conference audience – Germany isn’t impressed with the images of Leipzig. Ireland’s representatives grimace. Sarkozy then suggests a 10% increase in the innovation budget – the visualisation changes dramatically to the positive. The genius of the 5-D modelling, as it develops, will be its capacity to present a potential reality which alters instantly with a single data input.

If we didn’t already have the data and the visualisation capacity, we could call this all pie in the sky, a floating man deprived of a sense of reality. Our challenge will be to measure the strength of the link between what the floating man perceives and the physical reality of the 3-D. A circle is stronger than a line – and as Professor Gann says in the video interview: “The linear approach is dead.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

The rise of innovation in a fifth dimension is linear modelling dead