Cannes impressions: Innovation category should showcase inventions with purpose

We’re not just storytellers and communicators. We’re an industry of problem-solvers and inventors. Fun fact: Richard Jones, a naval engineer, was trying to make a meter designed to monitor power on naval battleships when he accidentally came up with the slinky.

This year Cannes introduces the Innovation category. The 10th one to be initiated in eight years. Some would argue that the Festival is suffering from trophy overload. But read what David Droga has to say about the ambition for the category and you’re bound to get excited:

Too much of our time is spent thinking about the wrapping paper, and not enough about the actual box. Can we come up with ideas that let us see around corners and future-proof our industry? We’re not just storytellers and communicators. We’re an industry of problem-solvers and inventors.

And sure enough, many ideas in the shortlist did not disappoint.

This was the first time all the shortlisted entries had to be personally presented to the jury and a live audience.

Must have been nerve racking for the presenters, but what an incredibly interesting experience for us. To feel the human connection…to watch the faces and listen firsthand to teams talking about their ideas. Powerful stuff. From Morihiro Harano’s blunt yet sharp questions to Emad Tahtouh’s detailed grilling, I secretly enjoyed the Q&A sessions with the jury even more than some of the actual presentations.

Everyone has their favourites but The Natalia Project from RBK Communication Stockholm really got me. To quote from the Coca-Cola seminar, it is ‘work that matters’. The Ingress presentation from Niantic labs@Google made me reflect on how technology can and is making ‘social engineering’ an equally promising and scary reality.

But all the tech talk can be a smoke screen too, as you realize that something is just a next-generation build with some improvements or merely a new way of applying existing technology. I say this not to take away from how incredible all the shortlisted innovations were, but only to reappraise the ambition and scope of this new category.

Slinkies are super fun. Especially if you happen to be standing at the top of Jacob’s ladder. My hope however is that this category does more than become a showcase for gizmos, gadgets and games—ideas that solve no real problems, that reset behavior in ways we wish they hadn’t or wearables that make us hyper yet even less connected than before.

My hope is that this category spurs real innovation with a purpose—rewards and recognizes brave, thought-changing ideas that impact our lives in meaningful ways.

Stuff that’s been in the news this week like Google’s ‘Loon project’ that is experimenting with balloons to provide internet access to remote areas and MIT Prof Sugata Mitra’s first ‘school in the cloud’…

Innovation is about finding creative, technological and entrepreneurial solutions that make a difference to our lives. And many of the shortlists presented did just that. Complex technology. Simple ideas.

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