This post title comes from a sentence by Matt Ridley, a British journalist, businessman and author of popular science books with a very strong scientific background, who when pointing this idea out was making a word game which is easy to accept. Yes, ideas have intercourse taking into consideration that an idea is a combination of several ideas.

Tinder combines match.com with a smartphone. Pizza Hut melts Mc Donald’s and pizza. Mc Donald’s takes hamburgers through a production chain. There would be a wide number of success cases and all of them have in common the conjunction of different ideas.

From industrial world to tech world. Different models

2016 commemorates 400 years since the death of Miguel de Cervantes, literature revolutionary and El Quixote’s creator, considered to be the first modern novel. The book, as we all know, tells the story of a man who turns mad by reading cavalry books. At the time, El Quixote’s main character attitude and passion towards books was considered extremely deviant, mainly due to the high rate of analphabetism.

But the thing is that, Miguel de Cervantes was just making a point about a new technology unacceptance. El Quixote, the book, as it happened to VHS tapes, CD’s, or just a few years ago to Netflix and Apple TV are part of the same problem.

It is the case of disruptive tools from technology which mark the beginning of a new stage. It implies the movement from an industrial stage towards a digital stage.

World is changing rapidly. It changes due to technological revolution and it will carry on as it goes on. World evolves and we must do so along with it. This has stopped being an option to become mandatory and has gone beyond with creative (connecting and combining ideas) innovation (producing new things with different results) so it will generate differential factors and value added. Miguel de Cervantes said so: ingenious hidalgo, from wit, from creating ideas, from coming up with innovation. But who could just imagine what the whole thing was going to become at that time, isn’t it?

The whole and entire system structure (social, economic, educational, legislative) is based upon an industrial model, that nowadays, as technological revolution is demonstrating is getting old and obsolete. It is useless, and as companies and institutions understand it they will be ready to face it.

Multitask

One of the most outstanding characteristics of industrial world is specialty. People get their Bachelor degrees in faculties, colleges and schools, but studying within watertight comparments. Usually they don’t gather any knowledge other different discipline. The world was divided between Science and Letters or Arts students.

This works out within and industrial environment. But it becomes useless and it is not enough for a digitally technological environment like the one we are living in. If technology is producing substantial changes all around, where competitiveness through hyperconnected items and where global population growth will have innovation and creativity as a differential factor, then the time for multitask professional profiles is already here.

Studies and areas of work need other disciplines to come up with solutions or new developments to overcome current and future challenges.

Therefore, education shall be redesign and oriented towards future needs. Coaching current and new generations for all these changes will become a basic issue for companies and countries’ competitiveness.

At the same time, it is essential to link education with the real world and with the business world, so both areas can coach and prepare new generations for the upcoming world.