Our first innovation accelerator is the power of the network – a tool that allows minds to connect with other minds, exchange ideas, and make inventions.
Until recently, most geniuses were wasted.
Even if you were born with incredible talents, the chances of being able to use those abilities are limited, at best.
Although IQ is not the only metric for genius, the standard distribution of the Stanford-Binet scale shows that only one percent of the population qualifies within that category. Technically, this represents 75 million geniuses in the world. But how many of them actually make an impact?
Even today, not that many.
However, in tomorrow's hyperconnected world, extraordinary individuals will no longer be victims of class, country, culture, or lack of access to the other 8 billion people — among them, all the other geniuses in the world.
Over the next 6 years, the unprecedented convergence of 5G networks and satellites will bring 4 billion new minds to the web, unlocking the floodgates of human intellectual capital.
In the book “Abundance”, Peter Diamandis explores how the emergence of coffeehouses in 18th-century Europe became a critical factor in the Enlightenment. These democratic establishments attracted people from diverse fields, allowing different ideas to meet, interact, and produce new ideas that would have been impossible to germinate by a single individual. By becoming a hub for information sharing — an “internet” of its time — coffeehouses were instrumental in driving progress.
Unsurprisingly, we see similar network effects in cities today, including still in coffeehouses, as two thirds of all growth occurs in urban environments — most likely because population density leads to the cross-pollination of ideas.
This is why Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West found that doubling the size of a city produces a 15% increase in wealth and innovation (measured by the number of new patents) compared to the sum of two cities with half the population.
In 2010, approximately one quarter of Earth's population — around 1.8 billion people — was connected to the Internet. By 2017, that penetration had reached 3.8 billion people, or roughly half the globe.
But over the next 6 years, we will connect the rest of humanity, adding 4.2 billion new minds to the global conversation. Soon, all eight billion of us will be networked at gigabit speeds thanks to 5G.
If size, density, and data transmission speed have made cities the greatest engines of transformation we have ever managed to create, the fact that we are about to connect the entire world into a single high-speed network means the entire planet is very close to becoming the greatest innovation laboratory in history.
Adapted from Peter Diamandis