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The Newsletter | Edition 108
Progress Report is dedicated to providing inspiration for action. In our Off-White Papers, we provide practical guidance on how to respond to our rapidly-changing world. This newsletter explores those topics in real-time, with information and action steps on how to make progress now.

IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER...

TL;DR

We all know innovation matters. We know we need to focus on it. And companies' investment in innovation is ticking up, at least according to reports like this one from BCG in 2023. But doing it the way we’ve been doing it, without adapting to changes in the environment—like the end of ZIRP, ongoing debate over remote work, and more—won’t set ideas up for survival.

The natural next question: how do we adapt? To thrive in an environment that is changing dramatically, it's critical to have the most effective, versatile tools in your toolkit (and to be ready to pull them out anytime you’re faced with a problem).

ENTER: A DECK OF SCIENCE AND WHIMSY

Lucky for you, we have just the thing. A Deck of Science and Whimsy: Emerging Technology is a framework for thinking about some of the technological advancements that have been building over the past decade and applying them to the problems of today and tomorrow. Innovation is often seen as a stroke of genius, a Eureka! moment from deep within the laboratory. In actuality, it’s a collective exercise, one where we all stand on the backs of giants, and play our part in pushing improvements into the future.

For many of us that aren’t sitting in technical positions, our role is to understand the potential of capabilities others have created and leverage them in improving the lives and experiences of the people we serve. In order to do that it’s important to become fluent in what is emerging. And, frankly, to play with the ideas to see what is possible. A Deck of Science and Whimsy is just this: an opportunity to make understanding and innovating around emerging technology approachable, tangible, and, of course, fun.

Every few years we’ve gone through the exercise of auditing the state of emerging tech and creating a set of cards. We’ve always kept these to ourselves—partly out of natural protective instinct, and partly because we hadn’t seen the obvious reason to share them. But we realized that if we really believe in accelerating progress, we shouldn’t be hoarding them, we should be sharing them far and wide. With that in mind, we’re releasing a Figma file that has our full deck: 43 cards outlining emerging technologies across six categories (Power, Compute, Interact, Make, Move, and Optimize).

ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Use them!


QUICKSTART GUIDE

  1. Access the Figma board. Maybe even bookmark it for future reference!
  2. Review the instructions and use cases on the left-hand side.
  3. Pick a problem, and let the cards move you through it.
  4. Share the tools with your team, friends, clients, and beyond.
  5. Keep an eye out for our upcoming newsletter on innovation ecology, where we'll dive deeper into the ideas behind A Deck of Science and Whimsy.

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