Biggest Business Opportunities for the Coming Decade Will Be Offline
For the last twenty years, all eyes have been on the digital economy.
We created social networks, cloud platforms, e-commerce sites, streaming services, and mobile applications. All of them have transformed the way we communicate, consume, work, and learn.
But the next trillion-dollar breakthroughs might not come from a screen.
They will emerge in factories where machinery forecasts its own maintenance needs. They will appear in warehouses where the inventory renews itself. They will appear on construction sites where hazards are detected before accidents occur. Everywhere across value chains where every piece of machinery and cargo becomes trackable, traceable, and optimizable.
The physical world is being made programmable.
AI endows our machines with the capabilities of recognizing patterns and making decisions. IoT delivers a constant stream of real-time information about the physical world to machines. Thus, a new wave of intelligent systems is emerging that will not only analyze the real world but improve it.
Imagine infrastructure that predicts structural failure for the engineers. Imagine logistics systems that self-optimize. Imagine industrial equipment that plans its own maintenance before it stops working. Companies who are going to generate significant value over the next 10 years will not necessarily create new social platform or productivity applications. Instead, they will address practical problems of running their operations faced in manufacturing, health care, transportation, energy, farming and construction industries.
This transition is also going to change the process of innovation itself.
As opposed to traditional approach of developing some new piece of technology and then finding out its usage, the successful innovator should understand operational challenges first, collaborate with industry experts, find validation from customers and create a smart solution generating tangible results.
Venture studios which focus on Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things development have become crucial in this regard.
They combine technical, market and entrepreneurial aspects required to turn complex industrial problem into a viable business.
Innovation in the next decades will not consist in substituting humans with technology.
It will mean giving humans access to better data and tools making their work safer, quicker and more efficient.
It’s not about having the best marketing campaign over the next 10 years.
It’s about addressing practical needs of the society through intelligent, connected technologies with purpose.
This is what the next disruptive businesses will be born
