William Gibson, visionary writer and inventor of the term ‘cyberspace’, once famously commented, “The future’s already here – it’s just that it’s not very evenly distributed”. Alexander Bufalino ponders how to bring IoT’s future nearer.
If there’s one recurring theme that runs constantly throughout history – it’s the tension between the centre and the edge. When it comes to innovation, over-centralisation often stifles innovation, while too much freedom often dances with failure. The trick is to find a happy and appropriate medium between these. That’s a very apt description of where the M2M/IoT space currently is, especially where the involvement of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) – generally defined as those with under 250 employees – is concerned. Research from multiple sources shows that a number of issues – such as doubts about affordability, concerns about security, operational costs once live, staff skill gaps, management control issues and a lack of in-house technological expertise – are combining to slow adoption of what could be a major strategic game changer for many companies in this sector.
So what’s an SME and why are they important? SMEs around the world have a vital role across different economies: stimulating innovation, creating new jobs – especially for young people, enabling women entrepreneurs and supporting small, localised communities. Strategies to support their growth and encourage their investment in new technology are often also supported by regional, national and, in the EC, supra-national initiatives and funding.
For example, it’s reckoned that amongst the countries that make up the EU, some 21.6 million SMEs provided work for nearly 90 million people and generate just over €3.5 trillion. While they may not grab the headlines in the same ways that multinational brands do, the great majority of businesses around the world can be classed as SMEs, employing around two out of every three workers. On top of that must be added their potential for driving innovation through technology or new business models that often – and inevitably – challenge the status quo in original and implicitly subversive ways.
In many cases, this approach to innovation has entered national or industry myth. One gets the impression that there must be numerous garages, outbuildings and spare rooms that deserve heritage plaques as the birthplaces of multimillion and even multi-billion companies. Indeed, the garage in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard first began work together in 1939 is on the USA’s National Register of Historic Places.
Break on through to the other side
But, these days, you need more than just a bright idea to break through and realise an entrepreneurial dream – and fortunately many of the tools, social structures and distribution networks required are now available, some for free, in our infinitely networked world. The phrase that has been used to describe this is the ‘democratisation of innovation’, which elegantly sums up the availability to even the smallest company at affordable prices of resources that historically would only have been available to industry giants.
Examples of these include cloud computing, open source software, affordable robotics, social networking and messaging apps and 3-D printing. The potential impact of these is explained in an excellent book by ex-editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson – “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution” – which is highly recommended reading for anyone thinking of going it alone with the next great idea.
The role of enabling technologies is also emphasised by the OECD. One recent report of theirs, specifically on the potential of SMEs, says: “Information technology has great potential to narrow the information gap. It would be of great help to set up a ‘one-stop-shop’ system, where all the necessary information which affects firm strategies and decisions is made available in one place, as exists already in some countries.”
Apologies for inserting a corporate plug here, but with a nice bit of synchronicity, the ‘one-stopshop’ model just so happens to be Telit’s main marketing message of the moment….
What can our sector do to stimulate growth?
So how can the M2M/IoT community help these vital engine rooms of global growth and trade exploit our technologies, systems, expertise and experience to innovate more successfully and compete – or partner – with those big players already well established in this space? What lessons have we collectively learned from working with such companies?
As a relatively new sector – at least as far as the use of M2M/IoT terminology is concerned – it’s only natural that a lot of the focus of industry discussion so far has been on the underlying connectivity technologies and devices. As we mature, it’s essential that we expand this debate to include all the other human, cultural and organisational issues that are equally critical when it comes to influencing the success, or failure, of projects.
In particular, this is going to mean recognising that the models of the world that many of us carry in our heads – and are replicated in the organisational structures and relationships that support our business activities – are undergoing deep and often unsettling change. In some cases, these traditional perspectives are becoming increasingly irrelevant to what’s actually happening out there in the areas of fastest growth and innovation.
I’ve recently been lucky enough to have spent some time recently in both Europe and North America, discussing what’s ahead with some very bright – but firmly grounded – visionaries and entrepreneurs. While our industry has been burned before – dot.com crash, anyone – by the silicon snake oil merchants, those of us who have been through the hype cycles before can usually distinguish vapourware from real potential.
‘It’s Data, Jim – but not as we’ve known it’
In this context, I can’t emphasise enough one critical change that I’ve seen reflected both by this younger cohort as well as some contemporary industry thinkers who specialise in avoiding the status quo: the implications of a world built on the torrent of open, live, dynamic data that’s currently flooding in to and out of our systems, offices, factories, homes, cities and now, even clothing and bodies. Indeed, we’ve even had to invent a new vocabulary to quantify this shift – and the words exabyte and zettabyte could become commonplace as the building blocks of this new world that we’re creating for ourselves and our silicon-based companions.
While the phrase ‘the death of distance’ has often been invoked over the last decade or two to sum up the implications of truly ubiquitous communications, especially in the wireless/ cellular sector, we now have a generation reaching economic – and potentially entrepreneurial – maturity for whom distance really has died. It’s as easy for them to interact with a person – or a device, a location, or piece of data – that’s on the other side of the planet as it is with someone or something next door.
As an aside, is it any wonder that some parents have problems prising their children away from their screen and device-filled bedrooms to go and play in the ‘real’ world? The very idea of reality may have, and probably already has, different connotations to different generations. In the business context – and this applies just as much to large companies as to small – the critical thing to remember here is that this shift to a data-centric universe is not an incremental change to what’s gone before. We can’t cope with it in the usual way by adding on another functional silo to our IT infrastructure or setting up another department within our companies. In many ways, it’s as fundamental a shift as that brought by the Copernican revolution that spelled the end of the classic model of an earthcentred universe and is likely to have as far reaching effects on cultures and societies as Copernicus did back in the 16th century. IoT and what we might call ‘vast data’ are going to invert traditional models, processes and perceptions and replace them with something that previous generations would probably have found extremely unsettling – especially when it comes to the erosion of long-established and trusted boundaries between public and private spaces and information.
Where’s the money – in the crowd or in the individual?
Now, if you’re as sceptical of digital visionaries as I am, you’re probably trying to earth this metaphor to a familiar context. One example I can provide was summed up recently by an IBM spokesperson as the death of ‘the age of average’.
We all use insurance – and it’s arguable that insurance has been just as historically important as the invention of joint stock companies were in the creation of the modern business world, going back even beyond the establishment of the Dutch and British East India Companies. Insurance however, depends on statistics and actuarial principles to gather data and then estimate exposure to risk, so is implicitly based on averages taken from large population sizes.In this context – and the other lessons and hopefully useful insights that I’ve tried to communicate in this piece – it’s that the open networking of humans is going to be just as important as the open networking of things. Some of that change is going to challenge our traditional ways of doing this and be just as unsettling and potentially subversive as the new technologies and new business models that are now appearing in the M2M/IoT space.
Consider however the world that we’re now in where enough data can be gathered on you as an individual, your personal driving habits, the food and prescription and non-prescription medicines that you buy, pollution or crime figures for exactly where you live, the behaviours of family and even friends and acquaintances on social networks for a truly personalised insurance package, created specifically for you and you alone.
Who controls the boundaries and who draws the maps?
While this particular example invokes the potential of collaborative data it doesn’t highlight the corollary – that real value and true innovation are going to be driven by the actual and realworld collaboration of people, companies, governments and institutions. This necessary erosion of traditional boundaries goes against much of what people in large companies have been encouraged to think. Either/or binary models of customer/competitor or the power struggles between large and small companies for Intellectual Property and copyright must be replaced with an environment that’s far more open and equitable. That equitability must also extend down to the individual humans whose personal data is being used for profit or commercial advantage.
Such a model carries deep implications for the growing need for efficient security across these multiple players, platforms and devices and for the legal implications when things go disastrously wrong – as they, sadly but inevitably, will. When the first fly-by-wire commercial airplanes with alldigital controls appeared a few decades ago, questions were raised by software engineers and theorists about the potential dangers of code where it was mathematically impossible to simulate all the possible conditions that the programs might encounter in real life. It’s bad enough to lose a single airliner, but when you have whole civilisations depending on the code within IoT networks controlling utilities, water supplies, transport systems and other civilisationcritical infrastructure, it’s vital that these issues are addressed collaboratively to ensure a properly holistic perspective.
