Surfing the Six Waves of Innovation
Key Points
- The video uses surfing as a metaphor for technology “waves,” noting that just as surfers ride successive swells, businesses must navigate continuous bursts of innovation.
- Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 concept of “disruptive waves” is updated into six historical tech waves, each accelerating the speed of production, distribution, or information.
- Wave 1 (≈240 years ago) was the Industrial Revolution, introducing machines and water power that shifted manufacturing from artisans to mass production.
- Waves 2‑4 built on speed: steam‑powered trains and electricity expanded transportation; computers, electronics, and aviation added rapid data processing and global reach; the 5th wave—the Internet—scaled connectivity from a few million users in the 1990s to billions by 2016.
- The emerging 6th wave, beginning around 2020, is AI, which promises to further compress the time needed to create, deliver, and act on information, reshaping work and society.
Sections
- Surfing the Waves of Innovation - The speaker uses surfing metaphors and Schumpeter’s disruptive‑wave theory to illustrate how technology arrives in successive “waves,” detailing the Industrial Revolution as the first wave and the following transportation‑focused waves that accelerated production and distribution.
- Four Waves of Emerging AI - The speaker outlines a four‑stage surge in AI—data‑pattern generation, conversational large‑language models, autonomous agentic systems, and physical embodiment—while noting the associated tooling considerations such as A2A, MCP, Copilot, LangChain, and LangGraph.
- Timing Over Strength in Surfing - The speaker highlights that success, like catching a wave, relies on positioning, timing, and foresight rather than brute arm strength, emphasizing readiness and looking ahead to avoid missed opportunities.
Full Transcript
# Surfing the Six Waves of Innovation **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0Oa1kEyBg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0Oa1kEyBg) **Duration:** 00:17:59 ## Summary - The video uses surfing as a metaphor for technology “waves,” noting that just as surfers ride successive swells, businesses must navigate continuous bursts of innovation. - Economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 concept of “disruptive waves” is updated into six historical tech waves, each accelerating the speed of production, distribution, or information. - Wave 1 (≈240 years ago) was the Industrial Revolution, introducing machines and water power that shifted manufacturing from artisans to mass production. - Waves 2‑4 built on speed: steam‑powered trains and electricity expanded transportation; computers, electronics, and aviation added rapid data processing and global reach; the 5th wave—the Internet—scaled connectivity from a few million users in the 1990s to billions by 2016. - The emerging 6th wave, beginning around 2020, is AI, which promises to further compress the time needed to create, deliver, and act on information, reshaping work and society. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0Oa1kEyBg&t=0s) **Surfing the Waves of Innovation** - The speaker uses surfing metaphors and Schumpeter’s disruptive‑wave theory to illustrate how technology arrives in successive “waves,” detailing the Industrial Revolution as the first wave and the following transportation‑focused waves that accelerated production and distribution. - [00:05:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0Oa1kEyBg&t=306s) **Four Waves of Emerging AI** - The speaker outlines a four‑stage surge in AI—data‑pattern generation, conversational large‑language models, autonomous agentic systems, and physical embodiment—while noting the associated tooling considerations such as A2A, MCP, Copilot, LangChain, and LangGraph. - [00:12:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0Oa1kEyBg&t=765s) **Timing Over Strength in Surfing** - The speaker highlights that success, like catching a wave, relies on positioning, timing, and foresight rather than brute arm strength, emphasizing readiness and looking ahead to avoid missed opportunities. ## Full Transcript
Howdy everyone. We've often talked about how fast innovation is moving. It seems like wave after
wave of technology is crashing over us. In this video, we're gonna take a lighter approach and
look at surfing and the lessons it offers to help us navigate today's rapid pace of change.
Part of the relationship to surfing and waves is that technology often comes
at us in waves and just like waves. The economist, Joseph
Schumpeter, in 1942 actually wrote a paper writing about disruption and disruptive waves,
and what he was seeing at that point of how innovation and technology was starting to
impact society and business. And he really defined a set of ways that have been extended now to six
waves. The first wave that you see and these all these waves are all about technology
So they are technology waves. The first wave, which happened about
240 years ago, was really the Industrial Revolution. This is where machines and waterpower
allowed us to build goods faster than having craftsmen individually do it themselves. So we
were able to produce goods quickly. Then we get into the actually the next two waves. The
next two waves are really about transportation. This is the emergence of trains and steam
power. This is the emergence of electricity to power factories. This is all about how do
we extend our ability to manufacture goods and get the goods out to people
wherever they're at, faster than if we had to use horse and buggy to get stuff. So now we're able to
produce goods faster and get it to people faster. Then we start looking at our fourth wave.
Now, in the fourth wave, we started seeing computers come. We saw electronics that are
emerging. We also saw airplanes emerging. So, one, we were able to get goods even further and even
faster and be able to manufacture them faster. So we're able to distribute. But we also saw the
emergence of digital and information and being able to get access to information to do
computations on a much faster pace. And again, a lot of these trends, we're seeing them all deal
with speed, speed of building, speed of accessing, speed of information. That brings us to the fifth
wave. Now the fifth wave is really the internet. Up to this point we had to push goods out, but we
already saw in the fourth wave the emergence of information. Now we're taking that information and
getting it out almost instantly everywhere that people might need it. And so this is really a huge
explosion in a big wave that was all centered around connectivity It also had components of
software in it. If we really think about the internet, we started in 1990. Kind of at the
beginning, this way, with 2.3 million people connected. And by the end, really in 2016, we saw
3.4 billion people connected. Now, the next wave starts in 2020. So it's fairly recent. We're kind
of in the beginning of this wave. And this is the wave of AI. And how is AI transforming the way
that we work to actually be faster and, and impact us in different ways by operating on the
information faster. So we're in the middle of this wave. Now, the AI wave itself can actually
also be broken down into a set of waves that kind of describe how it's emerged. And these are all
the AI waves. And there's really just four major waves here. The first wave
is the birth. This is around Alan Turing kind of coming up with the concept of AI. At the
very beginning of computing in 1950. That kind of went into a winter period where we oversold
how good and how powerful AI could be, and we saw a lot of stuff in movies and it didn't really
result. So we went into a winter, but then we started seeing an emergence at the end of the
winter period, where AI started coming stronger by using ML,
by using machine learning. It also started using data to operate on. And we really saw this happen
with the Watson Deep Blue, I'm sorry, the IBM Deep Blue in 1996 as it beat Kasparov and chess by
taking information, learning and being able to play chess and beat Kasparov. Then we kinda move
into the modern area in the modern way. This is really about deep learning. This is really taking
it even further and start having systems like Alexa and Siri that can take information and
respond to a query and actually show a consumer angle to this. All of this started building up
into the wave that we're in now, which is a surge, a real surge of a lot of AI coming at us.
And even this surge can be broken into its own minimal, minimal set of waves that we're seeing as
part of that large surge wave. And so the set that we're seeing, there is one, AI that can generate
information for you. So it recognizes. It consumes a lot of data, recognizes patterns and can show
you patterns and trends, and we can operate off that. That was kinda the first wave in the surge
that we saw. The second wave is that AI that can chat for you, that we actually see the emergence
of large language models of LLMs that can take billions of parameters and interact with people
in a very natural way, go get information and bring responses back. So we see AI that can chat
with us. We ask a question and it can bring a lot of information back. This is gen AI. This is the
RAG models that we're seeing. Then we're seeing AI that can do for you. This is agentic AI. These
are agents. These are agents that can actually go do actions on our behalf, not just bring us
information, but actually do tasks. And it can do that in an autonomous way, and it can do that in a
way that it learns from it. And then the next and final wave that we'll see in this surge is really
around physical AI, where it comes out of the computers and we can physically interact with it.
And of course, all of these AI we waves are bringing a lot of stuff with us that we have to take into
consideration. Do we use A2A? Do we use MCP? Do we use Copilot? Do we use, you know,
LangChain? Do we use LangGraph. Like how do we want to do this. And there's so many technologies
available to this. And these describe all this surgent, this tsunami of waves around
AI that are coming at us. Okay. Enough with waves of change, waves of innovation and
waves of AI. Let's start talking about what this means for the challenges we have and how we can
learn from surfing. So, let's start with the challenges that we have when we're adopting AI,
and how we see a lot of similarity in the challenges that we have in surfing. The first
thing that we think about when we're adopting AI is how do I start?
A lot of times organizations don't even know where to begin with AI. And and in some ways it's
the same with surfing. If I wake up and I wanna go surfing today, it's like, well, do I wanna do
the break that's behind me? Do I wanna drive down the beach? Do I wanna drive an hour away?
How do I wanna do my surfing today? Where do I wanna go? So very similar kinda challenge. Next
thing we talk about is we think about in adopting AI is which technologies
do I want to adopt and use? And this is in the AI world, am I gonna use LLMs. Am
I gonna use a chatbot? Do I wanna do assistant? Am I just interacting and getting
information? Do I wanna figure out am I gonna build my solution or go buy my solution from a
vendor? Or what framework do I wanna build agentic? A lot of questions about technologies
that we have to think about. Same thing in surfing. If I'm going to a break the surf, am I gonna use
a longboard today? Do I wanna put my toes on the nose? Do I need to use a shortboard? Do I need to
use a wetsuit? Do I need a rash guard? So there's all these questions about what do I need to use
today in my surfing session. Then, we start asking about, okay, if I know the technologies, do I
have what I need to continue on? And this is really around
is my data ready? Is my data cleansed? Is it prepped and ready to use an AI system? Also, can
we integrate it? If I bring in vendor systems and chatbots,
can I actually integrate that with my legacy systems and make that work? I have the same kind
of thing with surfing. If I know I'm gonna be longboarding today, do I have the right wax? Do I
have the right fin setup? Am I going with a three fin setup? What length leash do I need to use? So
all of these things, once I know what I'm picking, then I kinda have to make sure that my whole
setup is correct. Then we go and we say, do we have the right
skills that we need to adopt AI? So, and and this one
I feel like we've been talking about in a lot of different sessions. What skills do you need? What
do you need to to develop your models, to train your models? Are you doing Python training for
your agentic systems? All of these things. Do I have the skills? Same thing in surfing. If. What is the
day gonna bring? Is this a big day? Do I have the skills for riding big waves? Is this a small
day so that I don't really have to worry about it much? Or am I going to, like I said, use my
longboard and just do some cruising? Or do I wanna do turns? And if I'm going to do the turns
switchbacks, do I have the skills to do that? So, when I think about where, how I'm going to start
and what I'm going to use, I also have to think about do I have the skills to accomplish that? The
next thing we think about when we're adopting is the timing. When do we need this? And a
lot of times we really start rushing when we want to bring in AI, and and it really is built a
lot on do we have the technologies? Do we have what we need in place? Do we have the skills? Same
kind of thing in surfing. If I just get up and say, hey, I'm gonna go surf, I need to know what the
tides are doing. Are the tides rising? Is it a high tide? Is it low tide? How does that impact where
I'm gonna surfing? Which direction is the wave coming from? What is the wind doing? Is the wind
picking up or is it calm and everything is glassy? So the timing of whether I'm adopting AI or
surfing is also extremely critical. The other thing that we really start thinking about
is organizational resistance. And this is really a cultural
thing as it kinda showed with the waves. It's coming at us really fast. We're in a surge. We're
in a tsunami of technology and capabilities that are coming at us. And there can be some resistance
to say, well, we need to slow the timing down. We need to pause. We need to understand what's
happening. And, so, you can see an organizational resistance starts coming up to prevent you
from doing the adoption. And same kinda thing happens in surfing, depending on where I decide
I'm going to go and what I'm going to need to do. How friendly is that break? Is it a friendly break
and and I can go out and there's no issues? Or is it a very local break, which is going to require a
bunch of different skills to have to adopt to, you know, the resistance that I have from fellow
surfers. So, these are some of the challenges that we really come across when we're adopting AI. So,
what are the things that we can do and lessons that we have learned from surfing that can help
us with this? Well, the first thing that we do is what are you trying to
do? And this is a question that you have to ask yourself, either surfing
or in business. And it really is in the in the surfing world is as I kinda
described. What am I trying to do? Am I trying to go big? Am I trying small? Am I trying to go long? Am
I trying to do a short break? In business world is what are the outcomes? What is it that you're
trying to accomplish? We shouldn't start by saying, oh, AI is here, we've got to do AI. So let's just
start applying all these technologies at it. No, you should really say, what are you trying to do?
What are the outcomes you're trying to accomplish? Same thing that we do when we go out surfing. The
next thing is be ready. Now, when I first started
surfing, I would go out and I would start paddling and trying to get into a wave, and I didn't think
I had the arm strength. Right? I was missing waves that were going through me. I was going early, I
was pearling, and I really thought it was because of a lack of arm strength to get me onto the
wave. What I found out is its it really doesn't have that much to do with arm strength. I mean, it does
play into it, but it's really about being in the right position at the right time. Having the
information about knowing where's the wave breaking? Am I closer to the pink and not off the
shoulder? Am I starting my paddle at the right time? Well, I will catch it at the right time. So, be
ready is a lot about about skills and technologies and having that available. But it's
also about being at the right place at the right time and part of that is to
look two steps ahead. One of the
things that I had happened to me in surfing is I'm sitting out. There is not a lot happening
during the day. And finally some waves come and I say, well, I'm not taking the first wave. I take the
next wave because I'm anxious and I wanna get on the wave. So I get on it and I ride, but then I
see behind it are some great waves. These are waves that I missed because I just wanted to
get going. Right? And a couple of things happen. I either miss a great wave or a big set comes in
and I'm caught inside in the impact zone and I get pummeled. So, you need to kinda think ahead a
little bit about where you want to be. So, what are you trying to do? What are your outcomes? also
look ahead. Where are we going to be in a few steps? Don't rush to adopt a technology that may
be the wrong technology up front, when you should wait a little bit and get the right technology. So
think about where you're going. And this also plays into be patient.
I know these waves are coming fast. I know they're coming at a rapid pace. But, if you've got the
right skills, if you're ready, if you're kinda planning where you need to be, be patient and let
it happen. Let it come to you. Let the wave, let the wait for the right wave to come. And when that
happens, then you seize the opportunity.
Go for it. Jump in and take it. You know you're ready. You know you've planned. You know you look
ahead. You've waited for the right moment. You have the right set of skills and technology for your
outcome you're trying to do, and then you go for it. In surfing, we kinda call this go big or
go home. Right? And you don't necessarily wanna go big or go home in business. the point is
the same. You need to embrace it and you go for it. And this can start pushing in some ways against
the organizational resistance because you need to you you take the risk, which there's a little bit
of resistance for, but you're doing it in a way where you're ready for it. So seize the
opportunity. When you seize the opportunity, you then need to embrace change
and adapt. Every wave is different. You ride one
wave and it goes a certain way. You go out, you take the next wave. Completely different. And so
you constantly finding yourself having to change, okay, this is different. It's coming a slightly
different angle or it's a it's it's breaking a little bit different. So I have to adapt and
change. AI is the same way. The technologies as they keep emerging, they're going to be a little
bit different. They're going to be accomplishing similar goals but in a different way. You have to
be able to adapt and change as these ways of technology are coming, much like I do when we're
riding surf. And then the final thing is to learn
from failure. A lot of surfing is is crashing, not getting up,
doing something wrong. Whatever it is that happens and you learn from that. You adapt and change. You
learn, you get back up and you keep going. Right? And you do something different. And that's because
the waves are keep coming. Right? In technology, the waves are gonna keep coming. So you have to
kind of do this little cycle here of seizing the opportunity. Have everything ready. Seize the
opportunity. Embrace the change. Learn from it and keep going. And if you do all this, then you'll
position yourself in a really great position to embrace everything. And the final thing there is
one more final thing in surfing. Cheer people on. AI in this wave of AI is really kind of once in a
lifetime, once in a generation wave that's coming at us and it's going to be intense. It's going to
be hard. There's going to be failures. Cheer people on. In surfing, when somebody does catch that
great wave, you cheer them on. All right. I hope you enjoyed this video. hope you
liked the analogy between surfing and technology. And now go out there and rip it.