Digital disruption creates new business realities

In a recent speech in Brussels, Luc Van den hove, President and CEO of imec, noted some new business realities. Luc said that the current era is full of questions about what direction to take — indeed, he called it the Era of Digital Disruption. Luc pointed out the following examples:

• The largest taxi company in the world does not own a single car (Uber)
• The company that rents more rooms than any other does not own any rooms (Airbnb)
• The world’s largest media content company doesn’t produce any content (Facebook)

These trends may be worth thinking about for your next design project. For example, we have seen the automation of farm tractors. On the new farm, the farmer gets up at 5 a.m., puts on his coveralls, and heads over to the workstation. There, he decides which field to plow and sends the fully autonomous tractor out to do the job. He brews a cup of coffee while keeping an eye on the four video feeds from the tractor. While the tractor is going about doing its autonomous job, it measures the soil moisture and pH and creates a map of the field showing the data — which is stored in the cloud.

The next step here may be shared resources. Why have an expensive tractor sit idly by? The day may be coming when farmers in the area may not own any machinery. They and their neighbors will share equipment provided by a third party, and neighbors schedule and pay for usage as they need it.

Autonomous or remote piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are scanning the farmers’ fields to collect soil and weed data. These too could be shared, if the designer builds in features for logging operation times and users.

These applications require integrated hardware and software and, of course, the cloud — or at least the Internet. And, it may be your initiative, in the business area for which you design, that kicks off a whole new industry.