There is a classic trade-off between rules and innovation, particularly if you work in a heavily regulated industry. So how do leaders balance the need for stability, compliance and certainty with a 21st century appetite for adaptability, agility and disruption? One approach is to learn to think a little less like a ruler, and more like a machine.

When photos of the Mi Mix smartphone hit the web, more than a few jaws also hit the floor. Black, sexy and ceramic with a bezel-less display, this sophisticated Philippe Starck designed phone was exactly the kind of device that a young Steve Jobs might have imagined and then built. Except this wasn’t Apple. It wasn’t even American. It was Xiaomi, a Chinese manufacturer once known for copying, rather than creating products. To understand the rise of Xiaomi and the growing number of emerging Chinese technology and appliance brands, you need to know something about the way that the Chinese think about innovation.

There has never been a more powerful narcotic than the digital device. The allure of gossip, click bait and games designed as devious compulsion loops are hard to resist. And increasingly, we simply don’t. Radio took 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million. Pokemon Go did it in just 19 days. So when is interaction simply addiction?

Moore’s Law, a prediction from 1965 that the number of transistors crammed into circuit would double every two years, has an expiry date. The problem is scale. The latest chips from Intel have silicon transistors with features as small as 14 nanometers. Theoretically you can have a feature as small as a single atom, but before you reach that point – at about 7 nanometers, things get weird. You leave the conventional world of classical physics and open a portal into the trippy reality of quantum physics. That’s bad news because by 2020, in order to keep up with Moore’s Law, the industry will need to be down to five nanometers.

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to a group of scientists for the creation of molecular machines with potential application from drug delivery to smart materials and even artificial life. By linking molecules together to design everything from miniature motors to tiny muscles, they opened the way to an even bigger idea — building structures one atom at a time.