In 2024, the Tourist Board of Wales announced it had become the first UK nation to enter the metaverse. I bet you haven’t visited yet. Three years earlier, Facebook’s parent company had renamed itself Meta, placing a very big, very public, bet on a virtual reality (VR) future.
The growth of streaming promised substantial rewards for brands leading the next step in home entertainment, and businesses would want to reduce expensive travel costs. If Meta could take VR mainstream, away from its gaming heartland, it would unlock a new industry and diversify the business, so it relied less on social media.
The metaverse version of Wales drew a meagre 4,800 visitors in its first two weeks, according to reports. Only a handful of other nations have joined it since, among them Barbados and Tuvalu. (The Pacific island nation poignantly created a digital version of itself to highlight the rising sea levels that put its real-world status at risk.)
Earlier this month, Meta announced a further 10% cut in staffing of its Reality Labs division. The company has invested more than $77bn on adventures in the metaverse, but not seen any meaningful commercial return.
Innovation needs more than invention
The fate of the metaverse illustrates the central conflict of innovation: invention is only the beginning. The real fight starts when a brilliant idea meets the messy reality of existing processes, current standards, and the human factor.
Too often, the “future” finds itself breaking at quarter past nine on a Tuesday morning. In my role in a business without $77bn to burn, we assess new systems through the priorities of accessibility, reliability, and compliance. The biggest headache often isn’t the technology itself but integrating it into the infrastructure and process that already exists.
If the metaverse experiment has failed, then I don’t think it’s because the technology wasn’t good enough. It has failed because it looks like a solution searching for a problem.
Everyday video calls have changed our working world because they deliver what matters – human connection. Where a VR meeting room tries to ignore distance, bringing everyone together into an imagined virtual space, Zoom or Teams embraces it. Covering up our body language in a cartoon digital avatar doesn’t help communication, it smothers it.
Where innovation meets need
One of the most inspiring examples of what’s possible when the right tool meets the right problem has happened outside of the headlines. In Rwanda, road quality can be poor (just 25% are paved or surfaced) and healthcare budgets are tight. For rural healthcare centres, getting emergency donor blood from the capital used to be a logistical nightmare, often taking hours that patients didn’t have.
A massive infrastructure overhaul will cost billions and take decades. So with a pressing need to save lives today, an inspired solution was found: the world’s first commercial drone delivery service.
The possible issues with drones, such as limited range and need for mobile connections, were non-issues in Rwanda. The benefits, however, were life-changing. Ten years ago drones began flying directly over twisting mountain passes that previously saw delivery vehicles bogged down, particularly after rainfall. Dispatch takes place from the Kabgayi hospital, based in Rwanda’s second largest city. While important, the packages are not particularly delicate, meaning they can be dropped under a small paper parachute.
The results spoke for themselves. Maternal deaths were cut by 56%. As confidence in the technology grew, drones began to be used to deliver medicines and vaccines, expanding the immunisation and treatment programme for rural communities.
In the west, we’re still waiting for Amazon to start routinely dropping packages into our back gardens. In Rwanda, they identified an urgent issue and picked the right tool to fix it. It’s a lesson we all should learn from as we integrate new technologies into our businesses and our lives. Innovation should never be about technology for technology’s sake.
It should always be about the outcome. By focusing on the why rather than just the how, we ensure that the technology we choose actually makes a difference.
Effective communication begins by understanding other people’s expectations and assumptions. Doing this requires us to burst out of our bubbles. Alex Wilman reflects on how rare this is, but how powerful it can be.
