The 50X Innovation Axiom
To be a true breakthrough, shoot for 50X better than the state of the art
To innovate, do something 50 times better than existing options. This axiom comes from MIT professor and Turing Award winner Mike Stonebraker, who urged that disruptive databases must be 50X faster than their ancestor. But there are more leap-frog paths than pure performance.
For example,
Novel manufacturing techniques, like Henry Ford’s automation, increased car production 50X from 1913 to 1924.
Radical user interfaces like the iPhone touch screen.
Automate cognitive tasks, like TIBCO Spotfire's brush-linking and recommendation engine for data exploration.
Faster fulfillment—Amazon Prime delivers overnight, not in a week; 50X faster.
Empower a partner that has 50X more presence than you.
Software-as-as-Service, Data-as-a-Service, and AI-as-a-Service. These cloud sharing styles help you reach 50X more people.
Self-service. #Businessintelligence revolutionized visual data exploration by making it for ALL. The same is happening now with data science and enterprise data fabrics.
Not all of these are precisely 50X, but they're big, bold, hard to do, and worth trying—it's how step-change innovation happens. So as you're planning your next move, keep the 50X Innovation Axiom in mind.
So as you're planning your next move, keep the 50X Innovation Axiom in mind.
