You probably realize that we haven't talked much about drones.
First, drones by themself are not
fundamentally relying on a single piece of digital technologies.
They can be an amazing vehicle to many of the trends we have mentioned.
DroneGrid for example, is a company that uses drone to access accurate arial information.
This information on construction site, agriculture,
or commercial solar sites can transform how maintenance operations are planned.
The drones are equipped with high resolution cameras and include intelligent software.
They upgrade to fly autonomously over for example,
a large field of solar cells.
The drones take pictures,
that can then be processed in batches,
to predict where anomalies have been spotted,
and help direct corrective actions.
Virtual and augmented reality,
those are other examples of technology combinations.
Sensing capabilities, big data and strong processing power are needed.
It was long considered relevant for consumer entertainment mainly.
However, the mainstream shift toward AR,
has enabled new business applications in logistics,
in maintenance, and product design.
The Echo for example,
has improved warehouse operations through an AR system.
Their picking staff uses wearable AR devices,
that offer digital navigation to figure out the right routes,
and pick the right items more efficiently.
This is saving time and reducing the number of picking errors by 40 percent.
And you can imagine expanding this to maintenance of industrial equipments as an example,
getting a known trade operator to follow a step by step AR guide.
He sees where to go,
he sees which parts are missing,
he sees how to assemble spares together,
and he just needs to follow the step by step.
Industry 4.0 is another trend.
You have probably heard about it a lot.
It is also referred to as the fourth industrial revolution.
It is the perfect example of how all trends that we have discussed are linked together.
When you bring them all together,
it gives you a surprising picture of what
the state of the art production factory should look like,
a fully integrated, automated and optimized system.
Well, rather than describe it,
we will take you on a tour in BCG's Innovation Center for Operation,
a model factory that we have opened in Paris in 2016.
Other pilots that we have run in Germany and in China,
have shown a five to eight percent productivity improvement,
versus traditional factories.
Obviously,
not all trends are equally important for every industrial companies.
Netflix is likely not going to be massively
impacted by advances in additive manufacturing for example,
but it might be impacted by AI or even blockchain as a way to trade digital products.
Any given company needs to pick and combine the trends that are relevant for
it with two caveats that we should remember.
One, watch out for second or
the spill over effect from adjacent industry. What does that mean?
For example, it is obvious that autonomous cars are relevant for the automotive industry,
and for software or tech start up that experiment with AI,
like Uber and Google.
However, intelligent self-driving vehicle can
also change how we run operations in more traditional industry,
like construction or mining.
Two, think of those trends as not only as trends,
but also as opportunity to grow your call or explore new growth options,
even if you are an incumbent.
Originally, the need to shift to the cloud for
Amazon was about their own infrastructure and operations.
It then led to the launch of Amazon Web Services in 2006,
which is now a 12 billion dollar business.
What are the takeaways I want you to keep in mind?
The list of digital trends is long,
and many of the technologies that we know are
combinations of multiple smaller fundamental building blocks.
Autonomous driving, or augmented reality, or Industry 4.0,
are good examples of applications that came from
combining multiple technologies to deliver business value add.
Not all trends are created equal.
They're not all the same for all industries and companies.
Explore your own options,
and be aware of second order spillover effects, especially from adjacencies.
