My new favorite speaker is Dr. Nick Bontis. He is smart, funny, dynamic and he has the intellectual horsepower to back it up. I found his work while trolling academic journals for intellectual capital.
Among his dozens of academic papers, I am particularly interested in one that rationalizes that allocation of knowledge assets. It’s brilliant for the reason that it employs much of the same methodology that we predict will be needed to build the innovation economy – not in the hallowed hall of industry, academia, or government – rather, on a platform of social media.
Here’s the Twist.
The following video was filmed about 10 years ago where Dr. Bontis is making predictions for 10 years into the future, the year 2010. His predictions do not explicitly include the phenomenon of Social Media. Instead, he extrapolates to a somewhat more “intellectual” outcome.
This is interesting because it provides us with an experiment that can exclude a huge variable called ‘social media’ and allow us to study intellectual capital as a distinction from Social capital. Dr. Bontis provides some remarkable insights about where we would be headed in 2010 (thus, compared to where we are), free from our social media bias. Cool, huh?
One statement struck my interest when he was framing a definition for “intellectual Capital”. He said:
“[All the data will eventually combine. We will then need to ask the right questions]”.
This is an evolutionary change in the way people will need to think. Instead of regurgitating hearsay (a social media staple), people are challenged to provide some modicum of analysis to sets of data that they encounter lest they remain useless (both people and data). This is expressed in the form of asking the right questions. The opportunity, therefore, is to bring people into contact with data in their communities and allow them to ask the right questions. We’ve coined this the “Last Mile of Social Media”.
Next he points out, with a very entertaining story, that 30 years ago a school assignment consisted of 95% search and 5% analysis (hence regurgitation) whereas in 2000, he estimated that 50% search and 50% analysis was allocated to the average academic assignment. In the future (year 2010), 5% of the time allocation would go to search and 95% would be allocated to analysis. Humans would become endowed with higher order learning and thinking skills, the ability to derive new interpretations that will accelerate innovation. So kids, how’s that workin’ out?
Of course, he did not anticipate Twitter. His portrayal of “Nancy the Supercomputer” is replaced by a Facebook the super social network…but even that sets up an even more interesting and important dialog for tomorrow. Bravo Nick!
Please take a few moments and enjoy this video from Dr. Nick Bontis
