The World Wide Web is 20 years old. It is a remarkable innovation that has changed our lives, especially for small companies in far corners of the globe; making it really a flat world. We lived on dial-up lines for a long time, yet made the right business decisions, providing clients with quality outsourcing services and building long term relationships, now almost a decade old.

How did it come about?

In this video clip from TED, Tim Berners-Lee, the Englishman who started the whole thing, talks about the origins of the Web and his vision for the future. He invented the use of hyperlinks because he was frustrated about accessing data in different formats. Crucially his boss gave him the ‘play-time’ to experiment on his ideas and to create the basic building blocks of the Web.

One of the important lessons we can learn from his story is about the importance of frustration and play. Identify the processes or issues that cause frustration to your people or your customers. Then allocate some play-time for your smartest people to conceive ideal solutions and experiment on how they could be developed. It is unlikely that you will come up with something as revolutionary as the Web but you might just solve that niggling problem with a useful innovation. Hopefully the slowdown would bring about more innovation from small companies and individuals that would transform our lives further.