The amazing pace of market innovation

Roberto Saracco January 20, 2018 Blog 842 Views

A snapshop of the drone market ecosystem. In this image one thousands companies working on drones in 2017. It is not an exhaustive picture, there are actually more. Yet it gives an idea of the fast growth of new markets today. Image credit: Drone Industry Insight Full resolutio.n image here.

I stumbled onto this interesting graphics as I was looking for Innovation Insights for a talk I will be giving at the end of January on Innovation.

The graphics represent a collection of companies active in 2017 in the space (now that’s the right word, isn’t it?) of drones. You can get more information on the Drone Innovation space by contacting DroneII.com

There are 1,000 companies listed, I did not count them -just trust DroneII-, and what is interesting is to see the breath of market space that has been created in just a few years, along with the number of companies that are populating it.

We see fields of application, from agriculture to delivery systems to flying cabs, we have many platforms manufacturers, flying cars, fixed wings, recreational drones. We have, as you would expect, companies taking care of the maintenance and the one focussing on helping companies to show drones and advertise them (specialisation rules!), you have service companies including insurance companies, market research companies and publication companies. Companies supporting flight planning and others specialising in developing software for drones, other providing testing facilities … and so on. Just take some time to look at the graphics. I found it very thought provoking and stimulating.

What is also impressive is that if one compares this graphics with the one created at the end of 2016 he would discover that over 70 companies that where there are no longer alive (in the 2016 graphics there where 711 entries), that is 10% have disappeared. At the same time 360 companies have been added to the 2017 map, basically one new company per day. Now, these are not (all) companies that have been created in 2017, several of them were already existing before, but their relevance grew to the point of making sense to include them in the 2017 map.

The market and biz penetration is strongly tied to the regulatory framework. In the picture the timeline for drone use in the delivery sector. Credit: BI Intelligence

Here a snapshot of the regulatory framework in different Countries. Notice that the most “open” is the Japanese market where there is the possibility of commercial flights and no requirements of license. In the UK we see the strongest regulations asking for licenses, training and so on. Notice, however, that in the longer term it is not a given that areas with low regulation will actually see broader penetration and higher biz volumes. Credit: PwC

A drone is an autonomous system, to a large extent, and it is also operating in a complex environment, interacting with other systems (hence the need to agree on navigation rules and so on). So it is not a surprise that so many companies have popped up. The drone is acting as the “seed” of a new ecosystem, a very powerful one indeed!