Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation

CHAPTER 1

THE END OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Throughout history, technology has often been great. But now it must also be good.

Companies that create technology that does good and avoids harmful, unintended consequences will win in the years to come. Investing for financial returns and for positive impact are no longer two different things. They are now the same thing.

Today’s powerful technologies have too much destructive potential. We’re already seeing how innovations gone awry can divide societies and wreck the climate. The one-two punch of Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law means that new technologies and any problems they create can explode into the world at greater velocity than any time in history. Moore’s law describes the phenomenon that ...