Thomas Frey's blog

In the late 1980s I was still working at IBM, but had taken on a number of side projects to expand my horizons. One of those projects was working with the City of Denver on the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport. At the time Stapleton was still in operation, and the new airport, DIA, was little more than a politician’s dream with a bunch of drawings and reports being pitched to the media.

How will businesses react if patents are granted in 3 months instead of what currently takes over 3 years? And what will it look like if patents are as easy to license as music and photographs? Here are four key trends that will drive the world of intellectual property over the coming years.

If you had a choice of flying from Boston to San Diego in a plane piloted by a single machine or the combined intelligence of 3,000 people, which would you choose? Perhaps you would want more information before making that decision. If the machine piloting the aircraft was a well-designed piece of equipment that had been used as an autopilot for thousands of successful flights, and the 3,000 people were of average intelligence living in the Midwest, which would you choose?

In the past, the vast majority of our layoffs were caused by economic downturns. As we move into the future, the tide will shift, and the majority of our layoffs will be caused by automation and technology. With all the chaos and uncertainty of a workerless world looming, I’d like to step you through some of the reasons why it will not be as bad as the doomsayers are predicting.

In 2003 the DaVinci Institute produced a landmark event called “The Future of Money Summit” which took place at the Omni Hotel in Broomfield, CO. One of the featured speakers was Bernard Lietaer, chief architect of the Euro. At the closing session for the event Lietaer introduced his plan for creating a global currency, a digital currency called the Terra

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the famous Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that granted some freedom to slaves. But true freedom was still a century away for those who lived in the black vs. white world leading up to the Civil Rights movement, an effort that began in earnest in the 1950s.

In 2004 when Chris Anderson released “The Long Tail,” the world was suddenly awakened to the potential for niche markets that appeal to an increasingly diverse consumer marketplace.

Over the 4th of July, I attended a theatrical production of the history of my hometown of Mobridge, SD. The actors and actresses did a terrific job of illustrating the tough times of the early pioneers trying to forge a new life along the Missouri River in barren lands of northern South Dakota.

What I found most interesting was that this production took place in a cemetery.

In 1954, Brook Stevens, a well-known industrial designer gave a keynote speech at an advertising conference titled “Planned Obsolescence.”

By his definition, planned obsolescence was “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary.” Over time, planned obsolescence has become a commonly used term for products designed to break easily, and our cars have become the product that most consumers associate with this business practice...But the idea of replacement cycles will soon change as we enter the driverless car era, as automobile companies make the transition from selling cars to selling transportation.

In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down the entire video rental industry, and its excessive fee-charging practices in the process.