Futurist Gerd Leonhard Interviewed By Magdalena Petryniak, Biznes Trendy

You say on your website that in the next 20 years the humanity will change more than in the past centuries. So what's the main changes? What's that change that's waiting for us?

Yeah, I mean, I like to say that humanity will change more in the next 20 years than the previous 300 years, because now we have reached a point where technology is actually becoming possible. So you're no longer saying, can we do this, or if we can do this, but now it's every question that you ask about technology is you always say, yes, we can do that, right? So can we get all of the data together to defeat cancer and and stop sicknesses by genetic engineering? We probably can, right? Can we get all the data together for business trends and can we have computers analyze? You know, the question is always— the answer is always yes, it's possible, right? It just takes a little bit longer. So now all these things are happening that used to be science fiction, like language translation, automatic translation, tracking, different kinds of advertising, self-driving cars, airplanes without pilots, you know, all these things that are science fiction are now becoming true. So for a lot of people, that creates huge business opportunities, but also very big cultural changes. Like, you know, we use the mobile phone to, to become our outside brain. So we get very much used to having devices that think for us. So we have a digital copy of ourselves in the cloud. You know, there's lots of problems with that and lots of good things. I think it's mostly good, but we do have to pay attention to the problems. I think for small and medium-sized companies, the most important thing is to use technology to a) reduce the cost of production and communication, and b) create better relationships with the customers, and then c) to see whether you can globalize in a way to do what you do outside of Poland, or in general grow this way. Most companies are successful now, they are successful because of technology. A lot of old companies are successful, and in many ways they want to keep technology down because it is a big change of business model, right? For example, new technologies like Airbnb or Uber or Dropbox, they become very global players, but for example, Airbnb doesn't own any hotel rooms, right? And Uber doesn't own any cars. And many others. So basically what's happening is that you have to look for business model where technology enables you to do something because of technology. So because of mobile, or because of the cloud, or because of the— and when you start with this, then it's different than when you start and say, okay, I have a business now, and how do I make it better with technology? That's one thing. But the other one is to say, how can I make a new idea that is based on the technology? So if you're a small company, you have to think about cloud computing. What can I do because of the cloud? How can I make my business more efficient and reduce the cost? How can I improve communications with the customer? And when you use technology for all of these things, then the most important thing is to have a good brand and create trust with the customer. And you can't really create trust through the internet or on mobile or an app. Trust is a between people. So you have good technology and then you build the trust at the same time. That's usually a good strategy.