Category: Technology and innovation management

Technological architectures

An important distinction can be made between architectural innovation and component-level innovation. The architecture defines the way different components or subsystems are organised and how they interact with other components. Often architectures themselves form part of even larger webs of architectures.

Innovations at the component level, which is a physically distinct portion of the technology that embodies a separate design concept, mostly reduce costs of production, and often take place at high frequency with a wide range of choices available. While the organisations that innovate at the component level are more dependent on past experience as well as economies of scale, the organisations that determine the architecture are able to depend far more on their value addition, as well as the sunken investments of many other agents into the system.

To change the architecture of a system requires many simultaneous changes to different sub-architecture and component levels, which may be beneficial to some agents in the system, but not to others (thus vested interests often create a path dependency). A change to the architecture could even disrupt industry structure, and it changes the way the markets judge whether a specific architecture is suitable for the function or tasks it fulfils. A combination of path dependency and architectural change can be used to describe why many industries (or architectures) have disappeared.

However, architectures such as the vehicle example in the figure above change slowly over time and can certainly be influenced by improvements at the component level. For instance, better electronic management of the engine may result in less frequent services, but the architecture hardly changes. Interestingly, the architecture of the vehicle also forms part of a wider architecture of road networks and urban designs, again reinforcing another higher level of path dependency. This nested nature of technologies at the level of architectures is what slows down massive technological change. To continue with the example of a car, passenger vehicles depend on the architecture of a road network. It is also dependent on fuel and maintenance systems, parking arrangements, insurance and all kinds of traffic and safety laws.

I find it interesting that two decades ago, electric vehicles were described as being massively disruptive resulting in the demise of the fossil-fuel vehicle. Now, many established car manufacturers have jumped onto the bandwagon and are investing heavily in their own electric vehicle technologies, and in doing so reducing the disruptive effect of alternative fuels. In doing so, they are making massive strides in fuel efficiency, reducing the weight of their cars and substituting harmful and heavy materials with materials that have less impact on the environment. The component and sub-system level innovations offered by electric vehicles are being incorporated into the designs of the older fossil fuel architecture, while the architecture itself is only changing slowly. In South Africa, the network of charging stations and points are slowly expanding, but the use of electric vehicles is still minute compared to the fossil-car usage.

Some examples of architectures and components are computers (architecture) and an internal graphics card (component) or a jet airliner (architecture) and in-air entertainment systems (components).

The reason why I thought it a is a good idea to go back to such a basic distinction as the difference between architectural innovation and component level innovation is that in much of the popular discussion about technological disruption (the fourth industrial revolution-talk) this distinction is not made. What I appreciate about the World Economic Forum is that they are raising awareness of what will happen to social arrangements when one architecture displaces another. But what is not receiving enough attention are the many challenges that we will face in developing countries at the level of sub-systems and components. This is where competitiveness, resilience and innovation are critical because this where the disruptions and discontinuities of industries will occur. This is also the area where developing countries usually follow (as outsourced manufacturers) and where we are the most vulnerable to the design capabilities and dense networks that existing in clusters in the developed world.

I will explore how these changes occur in the next few posts.

Becoming better at tracking how technologies change over time

The subject of how technologies evolve over time have been receiving a lot of attention over the last 40 years. Actually, much of the research work done in the late 80s and 90s are still relevant today. With all the talk of the fourth industrial revolution, the attention has shifted towards innovations coming from elsewhere away from what do we have to do in our own organisation to improve our performance, offer our clients amazing value, and to create the future we want to be part of.

I am working with several think tanks, research organisations and policy advisors to help governments and key meso-organisations to become better at tracking technological change and potential disruptions. This work draws on my experience of supporting industry and innovation systems diagnostic processes as well as my experience in supporting organisation development and change.

To be better able to predict technological disruptions meso organisations and policymakers must become much better at anticipating future demands. That means they have to shift from being demand responsive (in other words waiting for the private sector to clearly articulate what they need) to anticipating what is needed. This requires a deep understanding of how user needs are changing (market knowledge), but also of how key technological capabilities in the industries they serve are changing (technological knowledge).

The challenge here in South Africa is that most of the organisations that are supporting innovation and technological change are focused on fixing the past. Due to our countries past, they are trying to get marginalised people (women, the youth, black entrepreneurs) into the mainstream economy. These disadvantaged groups need a lot of support because they are expected to compete against incumbents who have access to capital, suppliers and markets.

This research agenda has three pillars:

  1. Figure out how well South Africa is doing in terms of technological change. Which sectors are changing faster, where is productivity and manufacturing value add improving, and where are we falling behind? This area of research is also about mobilising sector organisations, like industry associations or a whole range of meso organisations supporting the private sector to become better at tracking technological change.
  2. Make the landscape of technological support organisations more visible. These organisations can assist both the private and the public sector to embrace, experiment with or adapt to technological change. A next step would be to make sure that these organisations are incentivised to disseminate technological knowledge and that they are not only measured on how they assist individual enterprises or technology transfer projects.
  3. The third pillar is to improve the dynamism in how public sector organisations work together and collaborate with the private sector to promote industrialisation, upgrading and innovation. This is an essential ingredient to strengthen the countries technological capability, to reduce coordination costs and to foster healthy and pro-active public goods that encourage entrepreneurs to search and discover new economic opportunities.

The current research agenda is not yet comprehensive but for me the synergies between these three pillars are great. It is about technological change, about making sense, about promoting innovation within and between organisations and also about strengthening meso organisations.

How to cultivate a more knowledge-intensive team or organisation

It is interesting to reflect how over my career the organisations I work with have gone from trying to gather additional information from beyond the organisation to trying to make sense of all the information around them. Actually, some people I know are actively disengaging from reading newsletters, books, blog sites or other channels because they are feeling overwhelmed.

My career started in the ICT sector in the early days of connecting companies to the internet. In those days, people wanted to connect to the internet because they wanted to access some additional data, information and communications from far away. They sometimes wanted this internet connection, even if the real benefits of connectivity were fluffy and took years to realise. I shifted to the development sector in the 2000s. By then, many organisations had already started to benefit from this new connection to the information highway. The shift towards web sites, online databases, capturing learning and networks had already begun. In many of the projects I worked on, there were attempts to establish web-based knowledge portals, communities of practice, and online knowledge repositories around a vast assortment of topics. No longer was technical knowledge only available to geeks that could navigate obscure corners of bulletin boards.

Now it seems like organisations and individuals* are drowning in information. (I wonder if one could even argue that information is being reduced to data?). Folders are cluttered with documents – of which some are valuable and others not. Some documents are duplicated several times over on local hard drives, cloud drives and in inboxes. Decision-makers have more information at their disposal than they need, and they often have no idea how to figure out what is relevant or more valuable. Everything seems important, and too much content is collected and never used.

I often talk at events about how information and knowledge are critical for innovation. A culture must be fostered where what is known can be leveraged, thus supporting both continuous knowledge development and innovation. At these events, I am often told by participants that their organisations don’t have all the knowledge they need to innovate. What they need is not at their fingertips. Some express that it is crazy to propose that they start with becoming more sensitive about what they know and how they organise themselves around the knowledge they create and depend on daily. Some even claim they are not working in knowledge-intensive workplaces because people are not willing to write up what they are thinking or doing! I don’t think it is so much about documenting everything anymore. I still make for the exit when I am told that I must write up “best practices” or “lessons learnt”!

However, making better sense of what is known, and what is not understood, are critical — both for individuals and collectives. The search for complementary or necessary knowledge takes place both internally and externally. Internally, knowledge management is about continuously reflecting on what is already known by the organisation or team. It is about figuring out what to document, or what to keep in mind, or what to consider next time. Or it is about figuring out how to use what is already discovered to improve, products, services, processes and structures. Knowledge management is increasingly about being more sensitive to weak signals, responsive to new patterns and alert to odd findings. Over time, knowledge management is becoming a more distributed function as organisations become more knowledge-intensive. More and more people are somehow collecting, processing, adapting and synthesising knowledge.

The external focus of knowledge management is about tracking emerging knowledge or discovering new patterns or supplementary knowledge beyond the organisation or team. It is mainly about exploring what others already know and had the time and energy to document, or to track important developments in other domains and bringing the relevant ideas to the attention of the organisation.

To fill in the internal knowledge gaps from the outside, your team must become better at knowing what you know. This is of course only useful if you can turn what you know into value for others. If you are enabling knowledge development, you must be sensitive to what the organisation needs in the short and long term, so that information can be sourced timesously and over a time period. Teams must also understand how what they know is valuable and usable within the organisation and by its clients.

What is much harder is to get better at sensing where there are areas where more knowledge is needed, where things are not yet clearly understood or mastered. Many people I know spend a lot of time rediscovering what they already knew, or what their teams already sorted, stored or processed. This (re)discovery wastes a lot of valuable time and mental bandwidth. It often just adds more noise in the form of documents that are easily collected but rarely used or synthesised effectively.

It is easy to test how knowledge-intensive a organisation is. Ask your team where they start when they need to gain access to information they know should be captured somewhere. Do they begin internally, or do they open their browsers and start externally?

In knowledge-intensive organisations, the knowledge search starts internally. That is due to knowledge synthesising taking place and adding value to everything the organisation does. The internal search could begin with looking at data already collected, or with information captured in reports, files, photos or physical documents. Or it can start in more informal spaces, like in Slack, MS Teams or even Whatsapp or asking around in the corridors.

In knowledge-starved environments, the search for new or supplementary knowledge almost always starts on the outside. It begins in a browser or at an online resource. In these organisations, the value of improving how information is collected, organised, synthesised, evaluated is low. The pressure to use what is known, or sensed in innovative ways is also low. Improving how information is organised is simply simply not worth it. Lazy or ill-disciplined team members can undermine knowledge-intensification, because organisations have to keep legacy systems running in parallel to newer systems. For instance, some organisations communicate internally via e-mail, slack and other messaging systems. Documents are both stored in shared systems and are emailed about. This is clumsy and it reduces to ability of teams to build a coherent picture of what is going on, what is important, what needs to be maintained, expanded or deleted.

While permanent connectivity makes it much easier to search externally quickly, the habit of failing to collect, synthesise and create a more customised combination of knowledge also comes with other risks. The person doing the searching is at the mercy of tags developed by others, search rankings influenced by advertising spend, and increasingly a lot of fake news, reports, statistics. We all know that what is captured in the form of explicit knowledge is almost always far behind the curve of context-specific tacit knowledge that is hard to capture. This strategy of external search could work if your clients are less informed than you are. Besides, using search engines to find knowledge is also an art. There is also a lot of luck involved.

However, if clients want synthesised knowledge that fits their context, then organisations have to become better at enabling their own knowledge culture. Is your organisation the go-to place for certain kinds of knowledge? In a knowledge culture, it is not just about the technicalities of the search internally and externally. It is also about evaluating, refining and maintaining what is retained (and how) and how what is kept is organised or retrieved. Making it clear why something is kept or how a module can be used in combination with others is also valuable. If along the way documents are found that are no longer relevant, they are marked as unimportant and moved aside or deleted/archived.

Organisations (and individuals) also need to find a balance between documenting what is known for sure and exploring what is tacit, but not yet ready to be captured in an explicit form. This is where applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Trello and others are really valuable.

A knowledge culture values collecting, combining and synthesising information. It thrives on sharing hunches, talking about fears and opportunities. It is not just about proven content and technicalities. It is about:

  • constantly reflecting on what information is valuable,
  • collectively or individually thinking about which ideas, concepts or knowledge modules are used often to support decisions,
  • It is about talking about which concepts are drawn on frequently, and;
  • Exploring where explicitly captured or better-organised knowledge could be valuable for the organisation to draw on in future.

From this base, it is then easy to combine internal knowledge with different external knowledge. For me, starting the search outside is like searching for second-hand knowledge, while the raw material of ideas and insights of the internal organisation are overlooked or undervalued.

When an organisation becomes conscious of the value of their collective wisdom, far more care is taken to identify frequently used materials, modules, processes, tools, patterns, labels, thoughts and proven concepts. It is not just about the habit of collecting, sorting, storing and retrieving. It is also about reflecting on what works, what can be used better, and what kind of conversation or effort is missing. Then it becomes straightforward to combine internal knowledge with external ideas to innovate. If organisations reflect more about what knowledge is valuable and how this knowledge can best be kept alive for future refinement or use, then they will already be on their way to becoming more knowledge-intensive cultures.

*For those that are interested to know more about personal knowledge mastery, I recommend you take a look at the PKM course offered by Harold Jarche.

Is the Fourth Industrial Revolution a paradigm shift?

I am excited that the Helvetas Eastern European team asked me to write a blog post for their Mosaic newsletter about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The blog article and many others can be found here.

Regular readers will know that I am not so convinced of one big revolution; rather that there are many smaller disruptions. In this article, I argue that it is hard to imagine what a paradigm shift would look like. I make six arguments of why there are rather several smaller disruptions taking place. The credit for coming up with the image in the article goes to Zenebe Uraguchi from Helvetas. He is also the person that convinced me to write this article, and who guided me when I felt stuck. Thank you, Zenebe! Take a look at some of Zenebe’s posts on the Inclusive Systems blog of Helvetas.

The second half of the article I wrote is about figuring out which social technologies to develop that are needed to make certain technologies usable or beneficial to societies. Many of these social technologies are cultural or organisational, but there are also many public institutions and public goods that are lacking in developing countries.

To me, it feels that we are still just scratching the surface when it comes to helping the meso organisations of developing countries cope with technological change.

However, it is exciting that my research into discontinuous technological change and the necessary social and technological institutions that are required in developing countries is of interest to development organisations and governments.

I am looking forward to your comments, questions, contradictions and ideas!

Best wishes,

Shawn

Pondering disruptions and industrial revolutions

I am asked almost daily about my opinion about “the fourth industrial revolution”, technological disruptions and the impact on jobs.

Depending on who asks, I might fire off a statement like “I don’t believe there is a fourth industrial revolution underway”. Or perhaps I might be a little bit more popular and say “I don’t think there is one, but probably many smaller revolutions going on”. I must be honest, I have also told several leaders in business and government, “definitely, and you had better pull up your socks and scan the horizon so that you don’t get caught with your pants down”.

I do feel a certain responsibility towards those that ask me these questions. I am all too aware that my response might encourage somebody to think more seriously about their organisation’s ability to sense change and to respond. Or my response might paralyse, or maybe even give somebody a reason to remain complacent. The truth is, we simply do not know the exact answer or extent of the technological changes around us.

When the change is as complex as it is now, and so dispersed across many actors in the economy and the world, we simply do not know. We can measure patents, imports, exports, value add, jobs, but we simply do not know how many entrepreneurs, government leaders or citizens are reading up on new ideas, trying new combinations, dreaming in the middle of the night of new business models and arrangements. These changes, when they aggregate into a pattern or a groundswell, often only make sense looking back. When we look back we see those moments where shifts took place, where tipping points were reached, where narrow or broad revolutions took place. But in the present moment, it is just foam, sweat and conflicting messages in the news that seems to make us numb.

Maybe it deserves a blog post on its own, but what we have to bear in mind is that in the original meaning of an industrial revolution, the “industrial” should be understood as technological change. The revolution describes what happens to many forms of social institutions. That means small and large, formal and informal social institutions are too clumsy, too rigid, fitting an older order but not ready for the new order. So it is not the autonomous vehicle that will disrupt us (well, maybe us geeks might be very distracted by them); the disruption will come from the massive investments that would be required in transport infrastructure, in the way we move around, in the way governments regulate, collect taxes, and so on. Maybe it challenges how companies are organised, maybe it completely challenges global supply chains or creates new markets that are much better than older markets. The physical technology, when it outpaces the evolution of the social technologies, disrupts the latter.

I must say this in stronger terms. When the evolution of the physical technologies is too far ahead it destabilises the society, because the required social technology modules are not available. It destabilises because the “have’s” can draw from other societies social institutions, while the rest are left out behind a huge and growing barrier.

For me, that means that we should figure out ways to enable experimentation and innovation in social technologies because this is the hard part. Investing in a specific physical technology and the required knowledge to use is still the easier bit. Figuring out how to crowd in a broad cross-section of the society, how to get more people to try new ways of managing, new forms of enterprise, new arrangements of market and non-market actors; that is where we need resilience and creativity.

In South Africa, I feel that we are all too focused on the physical technologies, the gadgets. Yet, our societies ability to raise new enterprises, to experiment with new management models, new ways of doing business enabled by new technologies, is just too low. Despite having richly diverse demography, having people with great experience and qualifications unemployed or employed and frustrated, we are simply creating or encouraging too few people to venture out and start something new.

Why are digital technologies absorbed so rapidly in many developing countries?

Globalisation-weary politicians and advocates of local capability developments and geeks or technology promoters have one theme in common: technologies developed in the First World not only disrupt domestic companies, but upset whole sociotechnical regimes in developing countries.  While the benefits of digital technologies are not disputed, what is disputed is how to solve this problem.  This is where the two groups of lobbyists part ways.

One argument is that if local companies had some protection, better incentives, more support and everything else on their wish lists, then local entrepreneurs would be able to come up with similar digital technologies. How long this is likely to take and whether it will succeed is usually not discussed to any real extent.

The other argument is that disruption is good, and that the services of, say, Uber or Amazon disrupt local monopolies and save consumers millions while allowing “new” entrants into the markets. What happens when these global companies lose interest and withdraw suddenly, or when all local capacity to compete has been eroded is also not discussed.

I will steer clear of these and other flashpoints. For me the key differentiator that counts in favour of global digital technologies is that they create MARKET platforms. By market, I don’t just mean a space where sellers and buyers can meet. These platform technologies invest heavily in overcoming many market and institutional failures. For instance:

  • Many digital marketplaces carefully create trust systems where buyers and sellers can check each other out.
  • Most digital marketplaces give you lots of technical information, reviews from other users, and links to comparable products in higher and lower price brackets.
  • Most digital marketplaces coordinate logistics, customs, invoicing, tracking and customer support.
  • They accept numerous currencies and numerous payment methods.
  • Users can switch seamlessly between different platforms (add something to the shopping basket on your phone, complete the order on your computer).

This means that these global platforms overcome many of the market, coordination and government failures that keep developing country entrepreneurs so busy. Even though I have shifted my understanding of how economies evolve beyond market failures, I still see them everywhere. Maybe they are not as quantifiable as many economic theorists would make them sound, but their archetypes and characteristics still show up. I have made a note to explore these market failure archetypes in a next post. (other posts on 3D printing, IoT; tech push fallacy article over here)

The most disruptive digital technologies can be described as platform technologies, which means that they create marketplaces with their own institutions, rules, laws, recourse systems, fair play policies and competition between providers. These platforms crowd in both sellers and buyers. That is what makes them so easy to use, for both buyers and sellers. They personalise the options for market players. They integrate service providers and even regulatory requirements. So even if a better local digital technology may be available, consumers will go where there are more products, and sellers will go where there are more buyers. These platforms often displace or disrupt previous widespread platforms. The mobile phone has in many cases displaced several platforms, including newspapers. 

The only way developing countries can respond is to make sure that they create the right market-supporting institutions. The challenge is that while global platforms often start in one or two markets and then scale up, developing country governments have whole economies that are in need of interconnected and interdependent platforms. The challenge is to figure out which platforms would be the best learning places for rapid learning, adaptation and dissemination.

If you would like to keep informed of my progress on this topic, you can sign up in the box on the left of this post (or here) to receive a personal newsletter from me. I promise not to clog your inbox with junk mail. The sign-up form will help me to figure out what topics you are more interested in.

The difference between the terms Fourth Industrial Revolution and Industrie 4.0 matters

There are two terms that many of my clients use interchangeably, which really bothers me. The first is the term “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, and the other is “Industrie 4.0”. What bothers me is that these two labels represent two concepts that only partially overlap. Sometimes they are conjoined with an “and” in a sweeping statement to emphasise just how pervasive and disruptive a specific technology is, and how utterly unprepared everybody is.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a concept that was popularised by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (although the name goes back almost 50 years). Many international consultancies have also developed instruments and advisory services around this theme (I admire their animations and graphics). The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a banner over many new technologies. Most of the technologies that are highlighted by the WEF are not new, e.g. 3D printing, sensors and artificial intelligence, whereas the narrative of the Fourth Industrial Revolution highlights the effects of the convergence of several scientific and technological domains (take a look at this link to read more about some of the technologies). Due to the reach of digital technologies, smartphones and global software platforms, new applications of technology are spreading very fast. It almost seems as though the rapidity of technological development is increasing, and that the depth and breadth of convergence and its impact on industries, firms, governments and whole societies is potentially disruptive. Hence the “revolution” part.

I must add that not everybody is convinced of this revolution. Some argue that we are still in the third revolution, albeit in a second or third extension. Others argue that we are already undergoing the fifth or sixth revolution. Then one might also argue that revolutions are usually not predictable, or that revolutions go hand-in-hand with massive social, political and institutional upheavals, which we have not yet really seen. Others, like Carlota Perez argue that these revolutions are unavoidable, and that governments have a key role to play in preparing for societies to cope with these wave of change. In fact, we have not seen massive employment displacement in Europe attributed to massive technological disruption, despite all the machines, robots and drones. I for one am also not convinced that the technologies and their convergence are revolutionary. What I find really eyebrow-raising is the immense interest of capital and political elites in technology, and all the hype around these technologies. I must also confess that I am impressed by how well the applications, use cases and adaptation paths of many of these technologies are described on the web. For instance, take a look at the Blockchain use cases on the WEF site here.

The second label is Industrie 4.0. It is usually spelled this way because the concept originated in Germany as the rallying cry of their new “High-Tech Strategy” which has emerged over the last ten years. The German high-tech strategy has a dual focus. The first and often overlooked emphasis is on continuing the incremental and export-oriented technological development that German manufacturers are known for. It builds on Germany’s current excellence and ability to innovate, especially at the level of product and process technologies.

The second and more frequently discussed drive of the German Industrie 4.0 strategy is all about digitalisation, knowledge intensification, trust building, dialogue and networking (some topical areas are described here). Digitalisation is not only about connecting things to the internet, but also about manufacturers being smart about integrating their suppliers, clients and internal processes. Improving the competitiveness of German manufacturing and making the society, workplaces and communities healthier and happier in the future are recurring themes. So are the environment, the circular economy and the importance of investing in longer-term technological platform and capability development. What only a few people in Germany would acknowledge is that this high-tech strategy was a response to the realisation that Germany was not as digitally savvy as one would have expected (to see the Tuft Universities renowned digital performance assessment of countries head over here). The Industrie 4.0 strategy in Germany (and now also in many other countries) is already quite mature, decentralised and, dare I say, pervasive. Also, Germany is very critical of its own performance. For instance, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), publishes an annual assessment (only in Germany) of the digital performance of Germany on their website at www.bmwi.de).

 

In Germany, and increasingly in other EU countries, it seems that every university, technology centre, industry association and consultancy is involved in cluster activities, Industrie 4.0 readiness assessments, technology demonstration, research and so on (look here to see a list of “testbeds” in Germany). The snowball is gaining momentum. Different ministries and spheres of government are coordinating around clearly described projects that are managed transparently and concurrently (look at the Platform Industrie 4.0 website to see the number and composition of initiatives). Many initiatives, such as industry mobilisation, making constructive policy inputs, developing standards for data integration, compatibility, etc. are being driven by private sector organisations, private sector representatives, science and engineering bodies or associations (Here is a link to the National Academy of Science and Engineering website).  Manufacturers in Germany are at this moment spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing which technology service provider to use to solve a problem or test a new solution (link to use cases, link to tech support centres). Both public and private service providers are striving to be relevant, at the cutting edge and valuable to the private sector.

Now this second label, Industrie 4.0, is something that the developing world should take note of. This industrial strategy is about much more than adding digital capability to existing products and processes. It is about a modern digital business model which is smart, has strong feedback loops within the organisation and beyond, and reaches out to suppliers, supporting institutions, clients and devices ( go here to assess your readiness and to see how wide this assessment is). It is not only a public strategy, but has now become a private sector strategy too. It is about deep integration, collaboration on long-term technology and capability development, co-funding, skills development and standards, and is globally focused.

I believe that this second label has the potential to disrupt the developing world far more than the Fourth Industrial Revolution notion can. If we do not respond, our developing country manufacturers may be left behind.

This is not about tweaking existing products, adding sensors or tracking data. It is about improving the ability of organisations to make sense of change, future possibilities and their performance within this fluid context. It means that those local companies that could be globally competitive would be under pressure if they were not able to tap into or track this gaining momentum in Europe and elsewhere.

Decision makers in business and government in developing countries often underestimate the funding and effort that go into building trust, collaboration and joint problem solving or policy making in Europe and beyond. Both Industrie 4.0 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are not about products or process technologies, they are about new business models and new ways of collaborating, with the long-term intent of laying new foundations for the future.

If you are a supplier to European manufacturers, be alert, be proactive! Get involved.
If you are competing with European products and businesses, be awake!

This is not a project for your design team, your IT department or functional managers. This is a strategic re-think of your whole organisation and how it develops new capabilities, how it measures and interprets data and how it works with other organisations. This is not a quick fix, this requires a longer-term holistic re-think of your technological capability, of the new applications that may be possible and of new forms of collaboration, co-competition and integration all enabled by digital technologies.

So why do I argue we need to understand these terms? I see the Industrie 4.0 movement as a strategic and intentional approach to shaping the future. While the Fourth Industrial Revolution narrative of the WEF and others helps us to understand what has already changed. It helps us to respond better, while the other urges us to actively get involved in shaping the future. I know this difference is subtle, and I know that the WEF is also trying to shape the future, but the popular narrative about the revolution is unfortunately often about technologies and how we respond to them.

Shawn in Wonderland

I have not posted anything for the last 3 months. I have been on an amazing adventure which is so similar to Alice in Wonderland that I might be asleep and still dreaming.

It started with a long-pursued opportunity to help a unit in the South African government prepare and think through the consequences of the “fourth industrial revolution” and the fuzzy collection of Industry 4.0 gadgetry that will soon overthrow our lives. By all popular accounts, this revolution will smack us hard, because the narrative in South Africa is that we are behind and falling further behind. The prophets blame all our usual reasons for this impending doom: our poor education system, our unskilled workforce, an unemployable youth, labour unions, capitalist greed, our government policies, inequality, high costs of everything, low public investment, corruption and the easter bunny. (OK, I made up the last one.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I know we are drifting sideways in many respects, maybe even regressing in some areas. For example, our economic complexity is in decline. Our technological capability is dropping. Many of our traditional sectors are uncompetitive. I have been working in the high-tech sectors and I know how hard it is to get to any kind of scale. Our institutions struggle to adapt, are underfunded, and our business people face high uncertainty, as much uncertainty as our public officials.

It is clear to me that the pace and convergence of change is increasing. The amount of information is increasing. We all are drowning in documents, reports, blog posts, emails, journals and correspondence. The demands both on specialists and generalists are increasing. So there is definitely something cooking.

But is it an industrial revolution?

Are revolutions not full of social unrest, upheaval of institutions, overthrowing of  government structures?

That is the big question that I started with. I must admit the empirical and academic evidence is thin on this topic. The only people excited are geeks and suppliers of gadgets. This really bothered me, so I tried to figure out what all the things are that I would have to understand to sense, monitor, track and possibly predict where technologies are changing, how these shifts could affect our institutional structures, industries and jobs.

So I went on the most amazing reading journey. Down the rabbit hole I went.

I started by exploring the literature on how technological change happens, how technology cycles unfold. I could get lost in little forests of papers, books and articles by many of my favorite scholars. I followed ideas down paths (to the 1980’s) and came back again to 2018. Actually, not much has changed since the early writings of Nelson, Pavitt, Lall, Freeman, Edquist, Perez and many others. I admire these scholars because they really grasped the principles at such a fundamental level that not even the arrival of the internet really nullified any of their theories. I then investigated technological evolution and was again inspired by the clear writing of Arthur, Hidalgo, Hausmann and Rodrik (on structural change and industrialisation).

Then I stood back and wondered about all the innovation, tinkering, risk taking and failing that had to happen to lead to the patterns that I found in the chapter on technology. Again, I went into a forest, this time looking at innovation, how it happened, did not happen and why. I was inspired by the work of Dosi, Fagerberg, Malerba, Dodgson, Teece, Utterback, Clark, Henderson and Christensen.

For a week I felt paralysed by these two forests. Are they really two different domains deserving separate chapters, or should they be integrated into one? In the past I have treated them as separate. So, I procrastinated and forged into one of my favorite topics, that of innovation systems and how they change.

It was always my intention to hold back on this walk into the innovation system forest, as I wanted to look at everything here with new eyes. I plunged into my favourite authors, Nelson, Dosi, Freeman, Fagerberg, Srholec, Lundvall, and some more Nelson, and many other authors I admire. I was again struck by the importance of building technological capability, increasing absorption capacity and the importance of social, technical and other meso organisations in all of this.

Towards the end of the innovation system week I ventured into the work of Johan Schot and Frank Geels, Andy Sterling and Ed Steinmuller (the SPRU network), and got lost in the world of socio-technical transformation. I could look at the literature on institutional change and discovered the work of Thelen. I spent a whole day just reading up on Carlota Perez, and the next day I went back to the earlier works of Christopher Freeman (which then lead me down the archives of the SPRU). Perez is one of the few scholars who even mention the word “revolution” and she argues that developing countries must embrace rapid technological change to achieve structural change.

I came out of this forest dazed, confused and inspired. All at the same time. I decided I had to integrate my innovation chapter into the technology chapter. It took me three days to integrate them. I also tried to integrate the socio-technical transformation section into innovation systems.

Then I went away on a weekend in the Bushveld in the Limpopo province in South Africa. Somewhere while breathing fresh air in the country-side I realised that technology and innovation had to be separated, largely because there is a tendency in South Africa to focus on linear innovation (science=>technology application => innovation). I recalled something that my late business partner and friend Jorg Meyer-Stamer repeatedly said.

“Technology is about action, about harnessing natural phenomena to achieve something. Innovation is about a difference, it is about doing something differently”.

For my client to measure and track technological change would not be too difficult. Measuring innovation will be much harder, as a lot of the innovation caused by the “revolution” are about changes in social technologies, organisational culture and strategy.

Four weeks into my study and I was left with one messy section. It involved reconciling my views on innovation systems with the socio-technical transformation and multiple pathways literature. It felt like I was stuck in mud. The common factor between these fields is the importance of adaptive meso institutions, tied with a balanced supply side and demand side interventions. Context matters in both these fields, far more than firm level technological use and innovation practices. What I like about the social technical transformation literature is their focus on developing “niches” based on unique contextual opportunities or challenges, and their recognition of how change unfolds and spills over in time. Too often innovation systems treats the system like a static network of publicly funded organisations.

So that is where I am now. My first draft literature study is complete. I’ve had so much fun during this journey. You would notice that I did not mention economic complexity much. The days that I somehow cannot account for was spent on that, but I really tried not to get sucked in too deep. In the end I decided not to include this in this study.

Stay tuned for a future update about what I discovered.

Industry 4.0, IoT, 3D printing and more. Why some technologies diffuse so quickly and others don’t

Revised on 2 March 2018.

I receive questions daily about the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, 3D printing and many other technologies and whether and how I think these technologies will disrupt manufacturing and education in particular and the world in general. These questions are not only from government officials, but also from businesspeople, friends and fellow geeks.

Let me briefly state that I don’t believe it is possible to spot a paradigm shift in the future or in the present. So I would be hesitant to predict whether or when all these big changes will happen. However, when we look back we can spot shifts. Technological change typically takes places slowly but surely, and then at a certain point there is a massive shift. The point I would like to make is that even the futurists have great problems predicting the direction of that sudden shift. We must also consider that technological paradigm shifts almost invariably do not work out the way they are predicted to do before they occur.

For the last few decades many major technological advancements have been heralded as game changers. The advances are often generalised as sweeping statements about large-scale change. However, in most cases, new advances take a long time penetrating our daily lives, if they ever get that far.

So let me rephrase the original question a little. Perhaps the question is more about figuring out which technologies are diffused quicker than others, and why. This is something that we can calculate to some degree using a short history and the current status quo of assessments of technologies that are being touted as near-term game changers.

Dissemination of technology or knowledge always consists of at least three elements. I will for now ignore the process of diffusion for the sake of brevity. There is a supply side, a demand side and some kind of institutional or social construct that enables and even multiplies the diffusion.

The supply side is often most optimistic about how their ideas are going to change the game. The demand side is often naive about how useful a new technology is in real terms. Many potential users simply wait and see. Then there are the institutional mechanisms that operate at local, national, regional and international levels. There are lots of tensions at this institutional level, because this is where a whole range of social technologies, formal and informal, have to emerge or change. Just think of how US-based software companies are constantly coming up against data privacy groups in Europe. I am sometimes grateful that the institutional level takes time to change. Changing institutions to enable knowledge dissemination often requires multiple knowledge domains, different management levels and social play-offs. Often changing institutional support to improve diffusion must also cater for integrating and synchronising many other simultaneous change processes that are not only technological. They could be about regulations, rights and creating new forms of organisation. Furthermore, physical technology does not always change things the way we expect. After all, innovation is a process of combination and recombination, both at the level of physical technologies and also at the level of social technologies.

There are typically a few constraints that frustrate the diffusion of new technologies broadly speaking. The first is the fixed costs of the technology itself. Fixed costs slow down supply (otherwise we would already have electric vehicle charging points throughout the country), and also slow down demand (I cannot afford a Tesla yet).

Suppliers like to think that their solutions will fix social mechanisms, but this is often the area where change is the slowest. Social technologies often take the longest time to evolve (for instance in developing standards and regulations for electric vehicles, charging points and recycling of batteries). By evolving, the technology itself often changes with respect to its use, meaning and value  – often beyond what the originators had in mind. Thus while individual users can quickly adopt a new technology or idea, formal institutions, regulations and supporting infrastructure often take longer to adapt to new ideas. This means that the supporting ecosystem that enables new ideas to be quickly diffused perhaps adds additional costs (perhaps massive infrastructure investment or learning is needed), or fails to reduce costs in the diffusion of ideas. This is where the second constraint comes in. It depends on how complex are the required social changes. I mentioned earlier that institutional diffusion must also integrate different complementary technologies. For instance, using a smartphone to make phone calls is easy (single technological paradigm). Using a smartphone to manage or monitor a part of a production line requires many complementary and concurrent capabilities and technologies. It may even require completely rethinking organisational structures, production lines and supplier networks. Simply put, if the new idea is very complicated to use (due to the many concurrent investments and capabilities that are needed), then the costs goes up in terms of education, regulation, infrastructure, coordination, specialisation, management and so on. Just think of what it would take for South Africa to adopt driverless electric vehicles …

Perhaps this also explains why individual companies (think hierarchies) tend to absorb technologies easier than societies or economic sectors. Inside a company management can overcome coordination failures much easier than within a sector or broader society. Meso institutions such as universities and technology transfer organisations are very important for overcoming these coordination costs, but they tend to change slower.

The complexity of technology and its demands on the meso organisation is important in my work. I help these organisations figure out how to navigate the complexity of new technology adaptation and diffusion. It requires an understanding of users, some understanding of technologies, but a lot of understanding of the process of change and organisation. I don’t think I would be able to do my work without my understanding of market failures, especially with regard to failures in the capturing, dissemination, absorption or valuing of knowledge.

There are lots of amazing technological ideas out there that have been tried, tested and measured and found to be effective. Many companies here in South Africa are already using these technologies. So supply and demand exists, and in many cases there are transactions. Yet many of our industries, enterprises, universities and policy makers don’t know how these technologies can save costs, improve efficiency or strengthen resilience. Nor do they know which ideas will stick or have the most impact. So there is a missing institutional capability that reduces the complexity of the technology. What is often missing are institutions that make the dissemination of new ideas easier and cheaper. It is often more the case that the users (and possibly suppliers) don’t know how much the full implementation or use of these ideas would cost, or what skills, complementarities or networks are needed to master new ideas. Many market-supporting social technologies (in the form of institutions and networks) are lacking. Somebody must reduce the search, evaluation and coordination costs. This is where the complexity lies. And neither do we want our institutions to try and implement every new technology – this is where social balance and a longer-term vision are required.

So now I can get back to trends such as the Internet of Things or digitisation of the manufacturing environment. Many manufacturers know about Computer Aided Design (CAD) simulation or even rapid prototyping. But how can we reduce their risk of trying 3D printing, or how can they add more sensors to their production facilities so that they can improve measurement and control? It is not just about the cost of using the technology once or twice. There are issues that are holding entrepreneurs back from simply rushing to an online store and hitting “buy now”. Where would they get the trained staff from? How would they train existing staff? How would they manage a new competency? What would it cost to certify or maintain? Where would they find new customers or suppliers, and what would it cost them to develop the complementary capability and optimally use the new technology? And most importantly, how do we reduce their risks of trying something in different combinations? These are the issues that a network of institutions must consider as they craft their technology extension and demonstration strategies.

For me there is a strong role for technology intermediaries to play in demonstrating, perhaps on a small scale, how new technologies can be integrated into existing workplaces. This means that technology intermediaries must be funded to host (and master) a wide range of complementary technologies, so that entrepreneurs can combine what they have in place with the capabilities of these technology intermediaries. Or that new entrepreneurs not burdened by sunk investments can use their agility to gain access to complementary technologies in order to create new markets. These institutions should not be measured by how many companies fully absorb new technologies (this could lead to perverse incentives), but perhaps by how many companies have tried, engaged with and been exposed to new ideas.

At the same time, policy makers should look at ways to introduce new technologies into developing countries beyond demonstration or technology extension. Some countries such as Germany or Singapore have also been purposefully supporting disruptive incumbent enterprises by supporting the uptake of new technologies. Sometimes you can demonstrate until you are blue in the face, but incumbents won’t change if they don’t have to, and small enterprises sometimes simply cannot build up the momentum to challenge the status quo.

I would like to end this blog by briefly summarising what I’ve been discussing. For me the question of how new technologies may affect our lives is too focused on the hardware  and the geeks who love it. Even though I admire the suppliers and developers of new technologies, and I really admire the sophisticated users who are constantly inducing the emergence of newer and greater technologies, I believe that the real change we need is in getting better at creating responsive institutions that lower the costs for suppliers and buyers to try new things. This is where we can overcome many of the costs that slow down the absorption or dissemination of new technologies.

 

South African Research units and funding scenarios

I have been holding back on this post for a while, because it touches on a very sensitive situation here in South Africa regarding the student protests about university fees (see #feesmustfall). In South Africa, many of our research and technology development units that are publicly funded are hosted by universities. These centres depend on students and particularly post graduate students to deliver services to industry. At the same time these centres depend on industry to commission research, prototypes and to also take up the graduates. With the massive shortage of funding in the education sector, many of these centres and their hosting universities are starved of funding.

In August, I was helping a leadership team think through their industry strategy. I realised that their strategy was dependent on two implicit assumptions. Firstly, that the student unrest about the fees would be contained and short lived, with government miraculously finding funding from somewhere to relieve the pressure in the system. Secondly, they assumed that the private sector would somehow remain keen to invest in R & D, problem solving and prototyping despite the political uncertainty and adverse business conditions that we have in South Africa at the moment.

I helped the team to develop a set of scenarios, and this is what this post is about. It was a spur of the moment idea at the end of a meeting.

A simple way to develop scenarios would be to take the two assumptions (we usually use uncertainties) and to construct a simple 2 x 2 matrix. I know a 2 x 2 matrix has many shortcomings, but this simple matrix was to allow a team to explore several topics they have been hesitant to consider collectively. This was about helping a group make sense so that they could develop some actions together. With the leadership team, we wrote an assumption about the stability at the university on the horizontal axis. On the left we have a stable political environment at the university, with some high uncertainty about how long the peace would last and how much public funding will be available. On the right hand side we wrote that the situation becomes both unstable and uncertain. This axis is all about the stability of the hosting university.

On the vertical axis we wrote at the top that business people remain optimistic and continues to draw on the facilities and the services of the research centres, while at the bottom we formulated the opposite.

This simple matrix gave us four quadrants which we numbered 1 to 4 clockwise.

Scenario_Matrix

The instruction to the team was to think of each of the quadrants in the extreme of the two assumptions of the quadrant if they both played out. I won’t repeat all that was said here, but will just briefly capture some ideas. In quadrant 1, the situation at the university was stable, while business people continued to draw on their resources. The group agreed that this was the preferred quadrant!

Then they consider quadrant two, where the university was in chaos, and industry had to find alternatives for their services, or they were stuck. Trust relations developed with industry over many years were harmed (again).

In the 3rd quadrant, industry is depressed or paralysed, while the university is unstable. Everybody loses. Good graduates can’t find work, good researchers and lecturers lose hope and possibly leave the system, while business slowly but surely falls behind because the instability is very local. Globally competitors are investing, expanding and growing because the world goes on.

In the 4th quadrant the industry is depressed, meaning that demand from industry is possibly suppressed. The stability at the university is uncertain, meaning little investment takes place. The university does not have the resources to build capability or offers that helps industry, while industry does not have the resources to expand their investment. The whole system just hangs there waiting for something to give.

Now I know that this little scenario exercise was done very fast (we spent an hour on this), and yes, I know it does not address the fundamental issues that the university and government (and politicians) have to sort out. But the leaders quickly realised that their whole strategy was based on a quadrant 1 scenario. In fact, the very academics that always complains about the short term focus of the private sector were now trapped in a short term survival mode themselves. No industry or society can increase its wealth, prospects or competitiveness by waiting, especially when global competitors are at the door, looking for opportunities! This quick exercise helped the team to realise they needed to expand their offerings to be ready for the very likely other quadrants. They also realised that they had to think of ways of adapting their strategy so that the small steps they could take with their existing resources would lay “platforms” or stepping stones for an as diverse as possible range of future alternatives. For instance, one of the technology centres decided to shift its focus from a product development to a process enhancement focus, because there was a strong interest from industry to find ways of improving operations, cutting costs and improving flexibility.

The scenario dialogue enabled several follow up meetings  where the team could draw in more people and together re-imagine their future alternatives. Everybody was relieved that they had some options, where before this meeting they felt trapped without many options.

What I tried to illustrate in this post is that a simple scenario exercise could be a great instrument to help a team realise that despite almost certain disruptions, they could still think in the short term and the longer term. They had some options, they could even create more. By anticipating the future they also felt more ready for the disruptions that we are all waiting for.

For me it was also important to see how this team realised that their clients (industry) also faced huge uncertainties, and that if the research centre could offer services that reduce risks and costs while at the same time creating alternatives for market and technological development. Somehow shifting the focus from their own survival (and fears) towards the needs of industry and graduates looking to complete their research helped them move forward. Thus I could help the team consider how they could ensure their clients continue to innovate, which in turn helped the leadership to better understand how they themselves then have to be innovative.

Innovation was instigated!