Cloud Foundry

Foreword

Continuous Innovation and the Cloud Foundry Phenomenon

We are living through a time of accelerating change. It is not just our imagination or our subjective biases that makes it feel this way. Not only do our basic materials for augmenting our intelligence and capabilities get cheaper and more powerful every year, but they are being applied in more ways this month than they were last month, this year than they were last year. The volume change is larger when it is measured by the number of people affected. In The Innovator’s Way, Robert Dunham and Peter Denning offer a definition of innovation: “the number of people who change their behavior in order to adopt a new technology or product.”

Because we are in a period when the Internet is still expanding to connect all of humanity, the number of people who are changing their behavior is historically unprecedented. As of 2015, three billion people are connected to the Internet; by 2020, there will be seven billion. This is 10 times the population of the United States and 3 times the population of China coming online across the world in only 5 years. At the same time as these “new activations” take place, those who have been on the Internet for decades are also newly activating a range of new devices along with the PCs and smartphones they have come to rely on.¹

These new devices are themselves only the tip of the iceberg. The Industrial Internet is already showing signs of growing faster than the established, human-centric ...