Introduced by John Psaila, Managing Partner of Deloitte Luxembourg, and moderated by Sarah Khabirpour, the 10th edition of Deloitte's Horizon conference was held on September 28 in a hybrid mode. In 2022, Deloitte will offer its event a brand new format. In the meantime, this year's phygital event gathered 50 onsite attendees and 250 online participants. This article, the second of a series of four, summarizes the sessions presented by Leo and Avanti Sharma.

Leo Sharma is the nineteen-year-old Co-Founder and Vice President Technology of Workshop4me, a non-profit organization that teaches children how to become the problem solvers of the future through programming and other technological skills.

Leo believes that the fundamentals of innovation stands as one of the least understood principles. He presented two perspectives to address this. 

The first perspective relates to the boundaries of innovation. According to him, leading experts often have a limited understanding of the future potential of their own area. "When it comes to looking at what lies ahead, they fall in the same traps as their predecessors and end up saying that nature or knowledge have a finite boundary", he said. 

Leo Sharma disagrees with this this vision of things and believes that "knowledge is expanding with an acceleration, just like the universe". The expansion of knowledge is comparable to Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years. "This means that there is a lot that can be expected", he said. 

The second perspective concerns the application of innovation. Leo underlined that, in the EU alone, billions of euros are allocated for supporting innovation. While some of this money does profit the corporate world and humanity, a large part of these investments don't translate into benefits. "The potential of the research done is not fully capitalized, and that's what troubles me", he said. 

Leo Sharma's theory is that "we must transform our current knowledge and innovation shape from a pyramid to a cube". According to him, most of the R&D money goes to researching new knowledge,  expanding the base of the pyramid. The layers above are the applications of the real world uses of knowledge. "Quite a lot of the knowledge we have has been tapered off when it comes to being applied, hence the shape of the pyramid", he said. "I have observed that innovation is relatively easy. But carrying it forward widely and implementing it in the real world is not well understood, even by the innovator himself".

Creative thinking and a multidisciplinary approach are needed to convert the pyramid into a cube. This could be achieved by introducing an effective set of KPIs at each layer of the pyramid.

Avanti Sharma, Leo's younger sister, is a Pre-Teen Technology Specialist at Workshop4me. She considers that we have to create an innovation framework where talents are correctly recognized and their skills harnessed. "We need to bring innovation to our school systems so that no more future Einstein's drop out of school or get lost in the crowd after graduation", she asserted. At the corporate level, the concept of respecting the environment should be the primary driver to design new products and services. "When we implement this approach", Said Avanti, "the gap between innovation and sustainability should start to reduce and sustainable innovation will emerge".

Michaël Renotte 

Photo: Nelson Coelho/Deloitte Luxembourg