Next, nanotrends
Read a nice little article in Forbes on “The Critical 1%” today. The notion of micro-trends, something that (in the current iteration) involves 1% of the population (obviously Penn & Zalense mean the American population) can be useful to challenge how we view innovation. For instance, according to P&Z 1% of Americans are “extreme commuters”, i.e. they commute to work for more than 90 minutes each way. This could be a fantastic opportunity for innovating entertainment products, cars, and so on. Heck, maybe even a club/platform for people who run micro-enterpreneurial projects during their commutes (hey, 3 hours a day is plenty).
Anyway, I think these kinds of moves towards “smaller thinking” are important. We’ve been stuck in “big thinking mode” for far too long.
Used to commute Lund-Halmstad for some years in the late 90’s, where I taught at a university college, as were several others; we used to joke about setting up a new department or research group on the train. Lund-Halmstad is slightly more than an hour.