Vivek Wadhwa

There is a lot of pessimism about the future. Some people argue that, other than advances in computer-related fields, technological progress has actually stalled: the internal-combustion engine, invented in 1876, still rules our highways; the cancer death rate has barely changed since 1971; today’s Internet was actually designed in the 1960s. There are fears that world wars will break out over water and energy shortages and that our standards of living will fall.

These perceptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

Vivek Wadhwa will discuss why he believes that this will be the most innovative decade in human history. He will explain how exponentially advancing technologies—in fields such as robotics, A.I., computing, synthetic biology, 3D printing, medicine, and nanomaterials—will enable us to start solving humanity’s grand challenges.

These technologies will disrupt entire industries, provide opportunities to create new ones, and help solve humanity’s grand challenges. For example:

• 3D printing and robotics will enable manufacturing to return to the U.S.
• Advances in DNA sequencing and synthetic biology will make it possible to engineer drugs for the individual and create personalized stem cell lines.
• Autonomous, self-driving cars will revolutionize urban transport.
• Low-cost tablets and artificial-intelligence–based learning systems will change the teaching paradigm and bring education to the world’s masses.
• Star Trek–like tricorders, holodecks, and replicators will become a reality.

These advances aren’t going to come from governments and large research labs but from small groups of motivated people. Wadhwa will give you a tour of the Star Trek future

Not long ago, you could see your competition coming. Management guru Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe how competition worked: a new entrant attacked a market leader by launching low-end, low-priced products and then relentlessly improving them. Now Christensen’s frameworks have themselves been disrupted—because you can no longer see the competition coming. Technologies are no longer progressing in a predictable linear fashion, but are advancing exponentially and converging. Fields such as computing, medicine, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology are advancing simultaneously, and combining these allows one industry to rapidly disrupt another—before market leaders even know what has hit them.

Practically every industry will be disrupted over the next few years, including finance, insurance, health care, manufacturing, transportation, education, I.T. services, and communications. Very few of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be on that list by the early 2020s. They will go the way of Blockbuster, Kodak, RIM, Compaq, and Nokia.

This is not all bad news, because disruption creates opportunities. New industries will emerge, and companies that lead the change will have the trillion-dollar market capitalizations. Business executives need to understand that:

• trillion-dollar opportunities happen at the intersections of exponential technologies
• disruptions are happening in every industry where technology can be applied
• entrepreneurs can now do what only governments and big corporations could do before
• if they don’t disrupt themselves, they will be disrupted by startups from other industries.

Businesses must learn the new rules of the innovation game and transform their employees into intrapreneurs who think—and act—like the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are gunning for Goliath.

Vivek Wadhwa will teach the basics of exponential technologies and convergence, provide examples of the disruptions that are under way in several industries, discuss the new rules of the innovation game, and challenge his audience members to think like today’s technology entrepreneurs—and to build the new billion-dollar businesses within their companies.

A common belief is that the sun is setting on the U.S. empire and that China is about to leapfrog the U.S. in economic terms—and in innovation. In addition to economic disadvantages, naysayers have long cited graduation data purporting to show that the U.S. is falling behind in mathematics and science education and have predicted that the U.S. will lose it global advantage because China and India graduate more engineers than does the U.S. China, India, and the rest of the world are now innovating as never before. But it isn’t their governments or education systems that are giving them the advantage—it is their nascent entrepreneurs. They are leading the way in innovation and helping the countries transform themselves. And contrary to popular belief, America is getting further ahead in innovation, it isn’t lagging. The U.S. is reinventing itself, just as it does every 30 or 40 years.

In this talk, Vivek Wadhwa will explain how exponential technologies are about to cause major disruption in several U.S. industries—but they will wreak havoc on the economies of countries such as China and Russia and the Middle East. That is because manufacturing is once again becoming a local industry and is coming back to the U.S., thanks to robotics and 3D printing; because energy prices, which fell temporarily because of fracking, will fall permanently because of advances in alternative, clean energies such as solar, wind, and geothermal; and because advances in artificial intelligence and computing are automating knowledge work.

Some countries will win in a big way and others will lose. Wadhwa will discuss his research on education and innovation in countries such as India and China and put this in the context of today’s exponential technology advances. He will discuss the opportunities and perils for countries that these technologies are introducing.

• How driverless cars are a perfect metaphor for our anxiety over where technology is headed
• What conditions make services or sectors ripe for a giant leap into the future
• Which industries stand to benefit most, and which will be upended
• Why Artificial Intelligence is both the most important breakthrough and the most dangerous technology ever created by man
• When, and if, society will accept robotic caregivers, housekeepers , and even warriors
• Whether cyber security can begin to keep up with our ubiquitous connectivity

1. trillion dollar opportunities happen at the intersections of exponential technologies
2. disruptions are happening in every industry where technology can be applied
3. entrepreneurs can now do what only governments and big corporations could do before
4. if they don't disrupt themselves, they will be disrupted by startups from other industries.