Rich DeMillo kicked off the Georgia Technology Summit with a very interesting presentation entitled “Murder, Starvation, & Catastrophe – What Eric The Red Can Teach Us About 21st Century Innovation”.

My first thought was who in the heck is Eric the Red and what the heck does he have to do with innovation in the 21st century? Well Rich believes that there is not a lot of difference between societies of old and modern day enterprises.

But Rich started out by talking about innovation in the 20th century being led by large research houses such as DARPA, PARC, Bell Labs, and IBM. While still around all of these research houses are no longer really innovative. Rich believes this downfall is due to:

1. Late recognition of explosive changes in technology;
2. Belief that past successes will lead to success in the future;
3. Failure to calculate value correctly.

Then the history lesson began.

So Eric the Red happened to be a fellow that lived in Iceland that had this nasty habit of killing people. He was banished from Iceland, so being the Viking that he was sailed west and inhabited Greenland. Seems like he built a nice little society there that grew to about 4,000 people. For some reason the civilization died out about 500 years after it was established. One of the interesting things that archeologists found, or more precisely did not find, were no fish bones in the excavation of Eric’s settlements even though there was an abundance of fish in the sea. It seems a Little Ice Age happened bringing some rather big changes to Greenland. This, coupled with the failure to adapt fully to their surroundings, and clinging too much to familiar ways of living (Icelanders ate only meat and the vegetables that they grew) ultimately proved to be the downfall of the first settlements in Greenland.

Then we moved on to Easter Island. According to him there were as many as 20,000 people living on the island at its peak but only 110 when Europeans discovered the island in 1722. What happened? Easter Island is famous for those Moai statures. Well it just so happens the place where they got the stone to create the statures was not the place where they wanted to erect them. To move the statues they cut down trees, lined them up, and placed the statue upon them. The old log from the back goes to the front exercise. They literally cut down all the trees to move the statues. No trees left a big hole in the food chain and a collapse of Easter Island civilization.

Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse where he studied the early Greenland and Easter Island societies. The first factor Diamond notes which has historically contributed to the collapse of past societies is deforestation. Rich equated venture capitalists in Atlanta moving to later stage companies as the deforestation of the Atlanta startup community (at which point Stephen Fleming of VentureLab pumped his fist in the air) and drove home his point by exclaiming, “if we only ate fish”.