Technology as a Platform

April 2016

We are entering a new era of innovation – one which has the potential to re-shape many of the industries that exist today. Some are changing dramatically already has they come to grips with the breathtakingly fast emergence of new types of competitors seemingly from nowhere. Company’s like Uber, AirBnB and Tesla who are massively reinventing markets and disrupting business models and their underlying economics with platform strategies designed to create global ecosystems and communities that connect directly with customers.

 

Whichever way you look new technologies are emerging in nearly every industry sector:

  • Robotics and intelligent sensors in manufacturing
  • Nano medicines which leverage off the mapping of the human genome
  • Synthetic proteins which will increasingly replace animal proteins as a major food source
  • 3D printers that can be used to make just about anything – from human organs, and specialized components to homes and buildings

 

Clearly this is not about faster, smaller and cheaper computing devices, or even another generation of software that delivers management and processes from the cloud. This is about Technology as a Platform for all industries. Its not just about the Tech sector and new tech companies, its about any and all companies using new technology to reinvent what they do from one end of the value chain to the other.

 

This is unprecedented change on a global basis it goes further than the industrial revolution and the changes that electricity brought to factories that enabled the age of mass production. It will save more people than the advent of penicillin and vaccines which eliminated many diseases and extended the average life expectancy by 20+ years, and in many respects its just as well. Because I don’t think you can consider the massive opportunities created by new technology without putting them in context with some of major challenges that the human race will face during exactly the same time frames.

 

These challenges include

  • Global warming and the need for sustainability to become a major driver of change
  • Growing water and food shortages in developed and undeveloped countries
  • Dramatic increases in the number of refugees and stateless people needing to find new places to call home
  • Rapid changes in the make up of the work force across many industries as processes and tasks are automated driving up unemployment as the workforce re-skills for a new era

 

An exciting era of opportunity and change or a period of enormous problems and suffering – 2 sides of the same coin. The most valuable and important corporations of the next 20 years will be those that use Technology as a Platform to meet and best one of the most challenging periods yet for the human race…

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