BIF10: IoT, New Verticals Drive Innovation In Mobility Sector

The walls separating technology from other industries have come tumbling down in recent years, said author, advisor and speaker Haydn Shaughnessy. 

Mobile technology has made companies such as Google and Apple players in everything from schools and securities to homes and hospitals.  

"You can apply mobile to all these different sectors," Shaughnessy told more than 500 people Thursday at the Business Innovation Factory's BIF10 conference in Providence, R.I.   

This outcome, though, was in no way preordained.

"People tend to think,  'The iPhone was invented, and then there were 500,000 apps,'" he said.

But in reality, apps didn't even originate with Apple. By the time the first iPhone came out in 2007, Shaughnessy said more than 50,000 apps had been designed for Palm devices. 

Google and Apple succeeded, though, by identifying and harnessing the power of connecting appliances to the web, in what would eventually become known as the "internet of things."

Android was fueled in the mid-2000s by the desire to create a camera compatible with both phones and the World Wide Web.

Shaughnessy said he wasn't surprised to see a shakeup in the telecom sector, which had become rather stale and complacent by the late 1990s. Looking back, he said it's clear that entrepreneurial and startup pressure was building in the half-decade before Google and Apple burst onto the scene.

But as the sector has matured, there's only a small number of companies that achieved success.

Shaughnessy pointed to Apple, Amazon and Google as some of the only businesses that ultimately developed popular platforms.

But the growth of those companies has come at the price of legacy players, Shaughnessy said, who downsized due to the loss of business.

This rupture turned many tech wizzes from cogs in a giant machine into businesses of one, which Shaughnessy said is often both empowering and impoverishing at the same time. Incomes for self-employed people in America have fallen by 65 percent since 1975, Shaughnessy said. 

However, in the push to identify the next big thing, Shaughnessy said there's been a lot of false positives.     

"We're a little obsessed at the moment with disruption," he said.

The nation has gotten to the point where business executives chalk a loss of just two or three percent up to disruption, Shaughnessy said, when it's actually just routine market fluctuation.

"Disruption is very profound," he said. "We just don't understand it."

Looking forward, though, Shaughnessy worries that shareholder pressure is chipping away at innovation.

He pointed to the $1.5 trillion in cash stashed overseas by Standard & Poor's companies in 2013 and the $500 million spend by those same firms on stock buybacks as money that could have been put to better use.

"There is a lobby for share buybacks," Shaughnessy said. "There is no lobby to put the money into productive investments."