Biggest social issues 'to be solved in smallest ways' predicts Not Impossible Foundation founder Mick Ebeling
"We will see the biggest issues solved in the smallest ways" the Cannes Titanium Lion winning founder of the Not Impossible Foundation, Mick Ebeling has predicted while speaking as part of a panel at Ad Tech New York.
Having opened the annual conference with a keynote recounting insight into how he and friends used 3D printing to help print an arm for a bombing victim in Africa and how further use of the technology was helping to change lives in the country, which won five prizes at Cannes Lions this year, Ebeling was joined by representatives from Wallmart and Unilever to discuss how brands were using technology to change lives.
The three were asked to predict what technology they thought would transform the world, which Babs Rangaiah, VP Global Media Innovation & Ventures for Unilever began by citing the impending launch of the Apple Watch as one innovation that, alongside the Internet of Things, would change the world.
"Even if the watch isn't the greatest thing at first, maybe it will be maybe it won't be, but they [Apple] revolutionised the music industry and phones. I believe that will be a transformational thing also," explained Rangaiah before turning his attention to the disruption facing education and universities specifically.
"Universities as we know them, will change because of the cost not being sustainable and with all of the online universities. There will be huge disruption, although at the top, the Harvards and the Yales will stay for some time," continued Rangaiah who also cited the online education partnership between Harvard and MIT called edX as an example of online learning of the future.
Programmatic trading was another element of disruption that he cited as transformational.
Meanwhile, Brian Monahan, Walmart.com's vice president of marketing spoke about the evolution and digitalisation of toys, citing Hasrbo Telepods as an example of one element steering the digitalisation of play.
Ebeling concurred and name dropped Skylanders and Disney Infinity as other key players in the online toy field, which led him to discuss how 3D printing was another emerging element of digital interactivity.
"My seven-year-old could 3D print before he could read", claimed Ebeling. "Now you look at 3D printing as an umbilical chord to literally make anything that we want. And there's a digital element there. I said to my son 'Let's go buy something' and he asked why we couldn't just print it. That physical/digital interaction is going to be huge and it speaks to wearables very much."
Ebeling concluded the session by foreseeing larger world issues as also being solved "in the smallest ways" such as clean drinking water in developing countries.
"You are going to start to see things happen around that. It's going to be the 'duh' moment where we will think 'wait a minute. We had access to that for so long.' Some of the bigger issues are going to be solved by the crowd in the simplest ways," he claimed as the session drew to a close.