At Rio Innovation Week, an event with 180,000 visitors in 3 days, I walked on stage SOCIETY 5.0 with a simple message:
“We are not here to fight against machines — we are here to write the next chapter of humanity.”
This wasn’t just a keynote line. It’s a compass I’ve been carrying for years, and Rio was the right moment to share it.
Why Rio Mattered
Rio Innovation Week is the largest innovation event in Latin America. It’s noisy, crowded, buzzing with robots, startups, AI demos, venture pitches, and government delegations. You feel the future in the air — and also the tension.
The tension is this: people are simultaneously inspired and afraid. Inspired by what AI, robotics, and biotechnology can do. Afraid of what they will take away — jobs, stability, meaning.
That’s why my keynote didn’t start with hype or fear. It started with leadership.
The Society 5.0 Lens
The frame I used in Rio was Society 5.0 — a Japanese concept launched in 2016. Unlike Industry 4.0 (which is about digital factories), Society 5.0 is about merging cyberspace and physical space in a way that keeps humans at the center.
But I reminded the audience: you cannot just copy-paste Japan’s model into Brazil or Argentina, or anywhere else. Context matters.
- Japan: high discipline, low creativity.
- Brazil: high creativity, lower discipline.
The lesson? Every country must adapt, not imitate.
The four pillars I highlighted — smart infrastructure, inclusive innovation, circular systems, and ethical automation— are not buzzwords. They are survival strategies. They determine whether technology makes us freer, or more fragile.
Leadership in the Age of Acceleration
I asked the audience to reflect on a paradox: technology grows exponentially, while organizations evolve logarithmically.
- In the 1970s, a company could expect to stay in the S&P 500 for 35 years.
- Today, the average is less than 12.
Half of Fortune 500 companies from 20 years ago don’t exist anymore. Disruption is now structural, not exceptional.
The pressure this puts on leaders is brutal. It’s not that we don’t have enough technology. It’s that our leadership models are too slow.
This is why I say: innovation is not optional. It’s the most expensive luxury a company refusing Innovation now.
Culture Eats Strategy — and Innovation
I showed a caricature during my talk: a young executive presents a brilliant idea to his boss. The boss says, “Thanks, but we’ve never done this before here.” Behind him stands a line of C-levels ready to kill the idea with more excuses: no money, not aligned with the brand, too risky.
And so the golden egg dies on the table.
It’s not technology that blocks innovation — it’s culture. The inability to say yes when the idea is still fragile.
From ISO 56000 to Innovation IQ
Some of you reading this are already familiar with my work around the ISO 56000 family. Fourteen years of debate among 38 countries resulted in a globally harmonized definition of innovation. It’s not just paperwork — it’s a language we can all agree on.
That’s why I introduced the concept of Innovation IQ in Rio. Think of it as the “fitness score” of your company’s ability to innovate.
Boards that don’t understand AI or digitalization can at least measure whether innovation is alive in their organization — and act accordingly.
When innovation becomes as embedded as workplace safety, it stops being a department in the basement and starts becoming part of the company’s DNA.
Artificial Intelligence Is the New Electricity
When I look at AI today, I see Edison’s lightbulb. At the beginning, people mocked it. Candle makers thought electricity would never scale. Ten years later, every factory was wired.
That’s where we are with AI right now.
It’s not just another app. It’s infrastructure.
I showed the audience an AI-driven e-commerce dashboard that connects marketing, logistics, call centers, and customer data in real time. Something that used to take months of filming, testing, and manual reporting can now be done in a weekend.
The real question is: do we have the courage to execute at this speed?
Formula 1 and Compound Innovation
I love using Formula 1 as an analogy. I worked a season in the industry, and one lesson stuck:
If you don’t update your car before every race, you lose.
The rate of development determines the champion.
In business, innovation works the same way. Small, consistent improvements — compounded over time — outperform sporadic “big bets.”
Innovation is not a sprint. It’s a system.
Courage and Change Management
The word that matters most here is courage.
Courage to say yes when others say no. Courage to align short-term demands with long-term purpose. Courage to transform people, not just processes.
That’s why I argue innovation must be driven from the boardroom down. If it starts only from middle management, it dies. Without board support, resources, and alignment, the best ideas get buried.
And to make innovation real, we need change management. If culture doesn’t evolve, no methodology, no dashboard, no AI will make it stick.
Cognitive Diversity and Nonlinear Thinking
I also pushed for cognitive diversity. It’s not about putting a Brazilian, a German, and an American in the same room if they all think the same way. True diversity is about thinking differently — and tolerating the discomfort that comes with it.
Innovation thrives on nonlinear ideation: multiple clusters of ideas, tested and re-tested. In this model, no contribution is wasted. Everything feeds the next cluster, until the best options emerge.
That’s how you unlock creativity in organizations that are trained to stay inside the lines.
The Ahead of the Curve View
For those of you who follow Ahead of the Curve Innovation, none of this will sound entirely new. You know my philosophy:
- Innovation isn’t about technology.
- It’s about people, courage, and culture.
- And above all, it’s about designing systems that allow us to scale creativity into measurable outcomes.
But Rio was a reminder of why this message matters.
When you see thousands of leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs standing in the same room — caught between excitement and fear — you realize something: leadership is the missing link.
Technology is already here. What’s scarce is courage.
Writing the Next Chapter Together
I ended my keynote with a call to action:
“Artificial intelligence today is just 1% of what it will become. Our challenge is not to resist it. Our challenge is to design the frameworks, the culture, and the courage to use it wisely. We are not here to fight against machines — we are here to write the next chapter of humanity.”
That’s not just a line for a keynote stage. It’s an invitation.
And if you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already part of the community writing that next chapter.
Let’s keep going.
Join me at alanzettelmann.com to watch the full recorded session and unlock exclusive access to the master class.
