IEEE Future Directions
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Over the last 30 years we have become better and better in extracting data from the world around us. Sensors based on a variety of ever better (and cheaper) technologies can detect a variety of real world parameters and more recently data analytics, machine learning and deep neural networks have made possible to read between the lines of the real world to capture intention and moods. The sensors market is a trillion dollar market and it enables a business that is way larger than that. It would be very difficult to identify an area today where sensing of some sort is not involved.
The Digital Transformation is enabled by sensors, most notably by the data they produce, and it reshapes the whole economy at a fundamental level.
The world of atoms, that sensors transform into a world of bits, is profoundly different from the one created and enabled by the Digital Transformation. More than that: the world of atoms, and its economic ground rules, is the one that has shaped the economy we have had for hundreds, thousands of years, the economy of scarcity.
Even the so called Knowledge Society, although based on immaterial assets, the Knowledge, is an economy of scarcity. Usable Knowledge transmission takes time, paradoxically as we have more and more knowledge available it becomes more and more difficult to get the one that really matters. Experts are scarce, the depreciation of knowledge makes experts even scarcer.
Yet bits are creating a new economy, that of abundance. Not because there are many bits, there are!, but because we can replicate, transmit and manipulate them basically at zero cost. In addition, a bit copy is indistinguishable from the original. That is at the core of the economy of abundance and economy where selling something –for free- can still make good business sense, an economy based on ecosystem.
This is an economy where rules are different, where companies have to open up, rather than build walls to protect their assets. It is the economy of open data and creative commons. It is as economy that on the one hand stimulates the birth of a myriad of start ups and on the other hand creates oligopoly, the G-MAFIA and the BAT.
The EIT Digital – IEEE Digital Transformation course includes several modules addressing these aspects that are so crucial for companies today.
Atoms are resilient and “heavy”, bits are fickle. You can put chains on atoms to ensure ownership and trustiness. Not so with bits, but technologies like blockchain can ensure trust and robustness to the world of bits and related transactions. Learning where and how to use blockchain to foster a business as it gets Digitally Transformed is crucial. Bits are cheap only at their surface. Managing bits in quantities that make than a real asset, the new gold, requires tremendous investment, and in turns it can only be afforded by a few companies with a worldwide footprint.
The Digital Transformation course, through examples and exercises, ensure the understanding of the bits economy and how to leverage on that, in many cases by flanking it with the economy of scarcity, balancing a company business between the two. More than that. I provides a grasp on designing new services and products that can leverage one or the other, sometimes both because in the end being successful in the Digital Transformation means understanding how to leverage both economies.
