The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future (6 page)

When your doctor receives a summary of your health tracking data, she’s leveraging a tool of precision that she currently lacks. Today, when a doctor asks us questions like “When did it start bothering you?” or “Have you noticed any other symptoms?,” too often, we don’t have an accurate answer to provide. In most cases, that lack of precision may not be significant, but there are times when a more accurate reading could be the difference between life and death. It can give a doctor the tools to assess whether the headache a patient is complaining about is a simple migraine or a deadly aneurysm—perhaps before the patient even arrives at the hospital. It means being warned, at home, by your smartphone, of the clot before the stroke or the clog before the heart attack—a warning that will make your mobile device seem smarter and more essential than ever.

This kind of technology can also help reduce disease mismanagement, which accounts for more than 30 percent of healthcare spending. With connected devices, doctors will be able to monitor high-risk patients at home, using sensors
that check everything from a patient’s vitals to whether she’s taking the right medications at the right time. These kinds of innovations could save tens of thousands of lives each year while substantially bringing down healthcare costs.

Of course, in the Third Wave, it won’t just be doctors who analyze your health data; it will be third-party apps designed to keep you healthy. Imagine the possibility of instant diagnosis, not by a doctor, but by a supercomputer like IBM’s Watson. These are the kinds of changes that will reverberate throughout the entire healthcare system. The CDC estimates that 200,000 people each year suffer preventable deaths from chronic disease. What if getting them to the hospital a day or even an hour earlier could save their lives? We can even quantify the value of those better outcomes: According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the value to the economy of this kind of monitoring could be as much as $1 trillion per year by 2025.
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And that’s before we even begin to look at the data in the aggregate. Once researchers have access to anonymous population-wide data, once that data can be analyzed, we’ll be able to see once-invisible patterns. That could change everything from how we track epidemics to how we characterize illnesses themselves, driving a genuine revolution in medicine.

More personal. More individualized. More data-driven. This is not just the mantra of the healthcare system’s future. It is
the mantra of the entire Third Wave. And it applies to another system that is big, important, complicated, and broken: the American education system.

Third Wave organizations—both for-profit and nonprofit—will leverage technology to revolutionize the way we learn. During the First and Second Waves, technology in the classroom looked a lot like technology outside of it: students at computers, making PowerPoint decks, browsing the web, chatting with virtual pen pals on the other side of the world. Each of these tools has proved useful, but few of them were designed specifically for the classroom. During the Third Wave, that is beginning to change.

Already, there are tools that teachers can use to interact with parents in ways that would have been inconceivable twenty years ago. Many schools now use virtual dashboards, where teachers post everything from homework assignments and test scores to videos of your child reading a book report in front of the class. Rather than reducing children to numbers, this kind of technology can provide a vehicle for parental involvement that didn’t exist before.

There are also new tools for teachers and students. In 2015, for example, I invested in Pear Deck, an Iowa-based startup that allows teachers to share interactive slide decks with their students in real time, while enabling students to indicate to teachers when they are having trouble, so that the teachers can adjust. There are also emerging Internet platforms where course materials can be shared and reviewed. In 2015, the
New York Times
reported on a company called Teachers Pay Teachers,
which provides an online marketplace where teachers can buy and sell lesson plans. One teacher profiled generated about $100,000 in revenue from a year’s worth of grammar, vocabulary, and literature exercises. “What started out as a hobby has turned into a business,” she told the
Times
. Teachers Pay Teachers CEO Alan Freed told the newspaper that twelve teachers on the site have become millionaires. “If you have a kid in school in America, they are interacting somewhere with Teachers Pay Teachers’ content,” said Freed.

Companies are also designing technologies to personalize the learning process—software that adapts based on how a student learns best. Students of the not-too-distant future might have the equivalent of a virtual tutor, a textbook replaced by tablets that track not only whether a child is learning but how he learns best. As the “textbook” gets smarter, so will the student’s teacher, who will have tools to leverage the data, and the time to work with students in the classroom one-on-one. Teachers will create short, targeted interventions that keep students on track or provide opportunities for them to go deeper in areas of interest and strength. The key will be replacing a culture of standardization with a culture of personalization. We don’t all learn the same way, or at the same pace—so why should we all be taught the same way?

Third Wave technology will also change how we measure success in the classroom. What good is an annual standardized test, after all, once teachers and parents can get detailed reports with a wide range of metrics, comparing their students
on a regular basis to others in their class or school or state? In this way, big data on individual students will do for education what standardized testing never quite could: bring quantitative precision to a qualitative learning process.

Over time, the role of the teacher may be transformed as well. In the mold of programs like Khan Academy, students may start streaming lectures at home on their textbook tablet, then spend class time doing what used to be called “homework.” Instead of giving a one-size-fits-all lecture to thirty students of varying levels of achievement, teachers could roam the classroom while students are working on problems, intervening to help them overcome barriers in the lesson. In the future, we may not be judging our children’s classes by their size but by the number of minutes they get to work one-on-one with their teacher each day—and by their actual learning progress. This would also allow us to stop using the blunt instruments of race or income to describe and address achievement gaps, and to focus instead on ensuring that each child’s personalized needs are met.

Whether that model will produce better outcomes for students remains an open question. But it’s one that can be answered by the data it helps us collect. We’ll suddenly have the ability to run low-cost experiments to figure out the effectiveness of these programs—in real time. It’s as easy as piloting the program in one classroom and comparing the outcomes to another classroom. Does the model work? The data can increasingly tell us, potentially very quickly. A school won’t have to wait until the
end of a long, expensive, multiyear evaluation to decide whether they are helping or harming students with this new model. They can adopt successful plans and techniques school-wide. And they can abandon unsuccessful pilots before they do harm.

Herein lies the transformative value of integrating the Third Wave into education. Today, the barriers for innovation in the field are high. And it’s not just because of government. Look at just about any public or private school in the country and you’ll see a structure that has barely changed since the nineteenth century. Talk to education reformers and they will tell you that one of the chief challenges they face is an education system that is extremely cautious. People are often more worried about the risk of trying something new than about the risk of maintaining the status quo. And too often, the latter wins out. The Third Wave won’t solve this problem altogether, but it can help. It can answer questions we’ve never had answers for, explain patterns we never would have seen on our own, and solve problems we didn’t even know we had.

Ultimately, the reinvention of education will require a multifaceted approach. Of course, at the core is the material that is being learned—the content, if you will. But, as we saw in the early days of AOL, it’s a mistake to focus solely on content. In the First Wave, we learned that context and community were equally important. At AOL, context meant packaging and curating to help guide people through a seemingly endless array of options, and striking deals with media companies that had trusted brands in order to help attract a mainstream audience.
And community meant creating ways for people to connect with the content, and with each other. Those same “3 C’s” that drove AOL’s success in the First Wave—content, context, and community—will likely power the education revolution in the Third Wave. Yes, you need teachers presenting content in the right way. But you can’t stop there. You also need respected brands (for example, top universities) offering credentials (degrees, or badges) that employers will value. And, you need to create communities around the content so that students can learn from each other, and then have a lifelong relationship with each other, forming a network that persists long after graduation. Education innovators were often too focused on technology in the First Wave, and too much on content in the Second Wave. The winners in the Third Wave will leverage technology and focus on great content, but also understand the importance of context and community. The integrated approaches they bring to market, largely in partnership with others, will likely usher in the revolution in learning that has been talked about for decades, but has yet to bear much fruit.

The food industry is a $5 trillion sector, and, unless you grow your own vegetables and hunt your own game, chances are you’re a frequent customer. Any Third Wave entrepreneur would look at those numbers and see opportunity. A lot of people have—and a lot of people do. They see a chance for
innovative Third Wave companies to challenge the way food is produced, distributed, and consumed.

That doesn’t mean you should expect to start seeing edible microchips. The only apples with Wi-Fi connections will still be your iPhone or MacBook. It also doesn’t mean you should expect mainstream adoption of “food alternatives” such as Soylent, a powder mixed with water that’s popular among some Silicon Valley elites.

Instead, the Third Wave will fundamentally change how we grow and raise our food, how we store it and transport it safely, and how we deliver it to customers.

Out of necessity, the agriculture industry has long embraced technological advances as a way to improve productivity and cut costs. Farms across America have, for years, been using sensors to track temperature, water saturation, and other critical variables for healthy yields of fruits and vegetables. But the Third Wave will take that to a whole new level. As reporter Nicole Kobie explained in the
Guardian
, the Third Wave may even save the bee population, which has been dying off mysteriously for years, creating a threat to our ability to pollinate our fields. One of the primary causes of the collapse of bee colonies is the presence of a particular type of mite. These mites can be killed by heat, but heating up the hive will melt the wax it’s made of. Killing mites that way would take out the bees, too.

So a group of researchers set out to solve the problem, developing a way “to heat up specific spots in a hive from the inside, rather than heating the entire structure, using circuitry that’s
screen-printed on to a hive base, called a foundation,” Kobie wrote. The bees build their home following the screen-printed pattern, creating a colony that’s connected directly to the Internet. Will MacHugh, one of the lead researchers, explained the system to Kobie: “What our electronics do is two things: they monitor temperature and they produce heat.” When the sensors detect a bee larva that might be susceptible to a mite, they heat up the area around it, killing any nearby attackers without harming the larva or weakening the hive structure.

“The bees actually kind of like it,” said MacHugh. “The mites, because they’re so much smaller, it almost pops them like popcorn.”

Once produce is harvested and livestock slaughtered, food in America goes through a food safety system that was created by Teddy Roosevelt a century ago and hasn’t changed that much since. In most processing plants, inspectors from the USDA look at less than 1 percent of the meat being processed. And the inspections they do conduct are mostly done by sight. Even when they test for foodborne pathogens, a positive result for something as dangerous as salmonella rarely shuts down an operation. From a public health perspective, food safety needs a technological reboot.

Third Wave entrepreneurs are poised to revolutionize this process. There are companies, for example, working on ways to use beams of light to kill pathogens without heating up meat, making it possible to guarantee safe processing rather than just spot-checking it. There are others working on smart packaging—embedded with RFID (radio-frequency identification), NFC (near field communication), or Bluetooth technology.
This will allow constant real-time monitoring of meat, making sure that refrigeration remains constant from factory to refrigerator.

It won’t be long before we can take this technological evolution one step further. Imagine a refrigerator that can determine whether your produce has been mishandled, or an oven that refuses to cook questionable meat. These are not the things of science fiction; they are the children of the Third Wave.

All of this will take place at the convergence of demographic, lifestyle, and tech trends that will also shape the direction of food’s future. Millennials, now greater in number than baby boomers, are generally more food-centric and more experience-centric. They tend to eat out far more than other generations, and they also tend to be much more health-conscious. According to the
New York Times
, per capita soda sales fell 25 percent between 1998 and 2015, replaced mostly by water. That demand for healthier food can be seen in the way fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen—which my firm, Revolution, invested in—are eating away at the fast food market. Unlike McDonald’s, Sweetgreen isn’t using tech to process foods; they’re using it to manage the logistics of a seasonal farm-to-table operation. That, in turn, has contributed to the revival of artisan farmers, who are able to sell fresh produce at better prices than they could get selling through distributors.