Whether it will need to come from the developing world or not, I overall agree with everything Shawn says in this video and he does a good job of articulating it.

I’ve often felt that we’ve “lost” something in the recent decades,  especially here in America.  For some reason we just aren’t seeing fundamentally new ideas or inventions coming out like we used to.  To use Shawn’s example, think of how fundamentally world changing something as simple as the phonograph was.  When is the last time you can think of something like that being invented?

I sometimes wonder if we’ve lost our spark for innovation as a country, which is pretty sadening.  I’m not giving up hope on it, but we need more people like this out there thinking of ways to solve problems, and we need a way for their ideas to get traction. Next time a friend mentions a new idea to you, don’t laugh it off.  Instead, try encouraging them to pursue it.

I whole-heartedly agree with him, at this point, what we need are a new set of fundamental inventions in order to propel us into the next era of incremental innovation.  There’s nothing wrong with incremental innovation, but we’re starving for new ideas to increment at this point.