The Moderate Manifesto
The first speaker at the World Innovation Forum was Paul Saffo. He was a very dynamic and engaging speaker who some call a “futurist”. There were few things that resonated strongly with me - at the end of the presentation he said that we need “more raging moderates”. 
Paul Saffo said that looking at new technologies or innovations, that many think that the growth rate is linear (or exponential in Silicon Valley) when instead it tends to follow an S-Curve (see graphic on the right thanks to
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2005/12/22/paul-saffo-on-rules-for-forecasting/). Paul Saffo says that innovators have the chance to be wrong twice: overestimating how fast things take off at the beginning and underestimating the change that will happen once things have taken off. The reason that I named my blog “NoHype” is that I like to be able to explain new ideas realistically. It is easier to take an extreme position - that a new technology will conquer all issues and replace all existing solutions. In general, changes take a long time to roll out and replacement of existing solutions take even longer. My twist on the “raging moderate” is that to help make change, my position is to give the compelling vision for why people should be enthusiastic about technology while sharing some of the potential pitfalls or challenges.
In my day job, the example is that some like to get into dogmatic debates on technology. My specific area of expertise is storage networking where there is the debate of FCoE (which another participant of the conference, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior would be able to give some insight into) vs. iSCSI. My position is that both technologies have their own space and that there is plenty of room in the marketplace for both solutions.
In the social media space, the S-curve also reminds me of the hype cycle. If you follow the space closely, there is always the next-big-thing - usually things get overblown or underestimated.
The challenge is that people don’t get excited (positively or negatively) over moderation. Do we need a moderate manifesto? I chose the title because unlike moderation, the term “manifesto” tends to get many people riled up. I’ll just continue to appreciate those that put aside partisan behaviour to be able to work together.
For more insights from the World Innovation Forum, check out some of the other bloggers - full list at http://hsm.typepad.com/inspiringideas/2009/05/seeing-the-world-innovation-forum-through-the-blogosphere-and-twitter.html. It’s been an amazing group to meet and discuss some of the topics with - I highly recommend that you check them out.
