“It’s important just to move things around and create a crisis again,” he says. “Reorganisation is one of the key elements. If you really can’t find another way, it can be enough even just to move people around to sit at different tables. It’s interesting to see how little is needed for people to get out of their comfort zones.”

A company can’t create innovative products, he adds, if it isn’t itself innovative in its culture and the way it is structured.

“An organisation is nothing more than a group of people forming a new creature. It can be either creative or not creative; it can’t be creative in some ways but not in others. I want to see how we can change things to make them more efficient and better. Everything that has not been changed in 10 or 20 years, or in some cases even 50 or 100 years, there’s potential to be able to do it in a way that’s more efficient. If something hasn’t changed in 100 years, it’s hard to argue that this is still the best possible way of working.

“I’m guided by how a computer system works; it’s probably the most logical way of doing the architecture. I’ve been very keen to create an organisation that works the same way: instead of having one centralised server that controls all the others, we have a mesh network—different nodes, interconnected with each other, which can all perform that same or a similar function.

“It’s not very different from how our body is built. Skin, eyes, heart, liver—they’re all made using cells that are precisely the same but are guided by DNA to grow into skin, eyes, heart and liver cells. This kind of network is much more flexible; it’s easier, if one node fails, to recreate it in another. If millions of years of evolution work that way, it’s probably the best way to do it.

“The Japanese have been thinking that way since the ’50s. They call it an amoeba structure, and they were pretty successful at that time, even though they couldn’t fully benefit from that structure because the internet, the cloud and mobile phones didn’t exist yet. They proved that you could run it with bits of paper. With today’s tools, you should be able to get all the benefits of coordination among cells.”

Read more: Filipino Investor Mica Tan On Innovating And Seeking Opportunities During A Crisis

Marketing, Sedic says, is the only thing other than product development that excites him, because it’s constantly changing. But it’s a challenge when your products are so innovative.

“There’s a huge difference between just another version of a product that people are already using compared to what we are selling, where you have no idea what it’s for or how to use it,” he says. “All the normal marketing tools like ads can’t help you. All they can communicate is: look at this product, it’s nice, this is its advantage over the competition. 

“What we need to do is storytelling: to first explain why they need a product like ours. It’s difficult to get people’s attention long enough to tell a story today. About 0.01 percent of new products are entirely new concepts—what an epic task [it is] to tell people about them.”

As you’d expect for an almost pathologically innovative company, counterfeiting and IP theft are big issues. Except, characteristically, Sedic doesn’t really regard them as problems.

“We are probably the most copied brand in the world,” he says. “If they can improve something, I actually don’t mind at all. I know that’s strange to say for an inventor, but I think the whole legal framework of patents does more harm than good. 

“It’s 100 years old and it can be improved. At the moment, it serves only one purpose: preserving the wealth of big nations against small ones, and big companies against small ones.”

The Catalyst Series is a series of roundtables co-organised by J.P. Morgan Private Bank and Gen.T. Each event features a guest speaker, with the aim of providing actionable insights that Gen.T honourees can take back to their business. See more content from the series.

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