This book is a good high level outline of future disruptive technologies, it includes a number of examples of current companies that are innovating in different industries and provides established businesses a number of ways they can innovate to survive the 4.0 & 5.0 industrial revolutions.
The book is broken down into three parts:
Part one covers a very high level over view of 6 potentially disruptive technologies for the next decade. These are: Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Autonomous Machines, Distributed Ledgers & Blockchain, VR AR & Mixed Reality and Connecting Everything & Everyone. If you have little to no knowledge of these concepts then this books frames the technology well and provides plenty of real life examples to put the technologies into perspective.
It’s important to highlight that this book is mainly written for people in already established industries that run the risk of redundancy if they fail to innovate. This is illustrated in the ‘Ultimatum’ in the title of the book. If you are looking for a book about replacing traditional businesses, then this book is the anti-thesis to a radical paradigm shift away from big business. This book shows business ways to stay relevant and how to innovate ahead of their competitors.
Does the information in the these six technologies provide any new information? Probably not, it does provide a very coherent introduction to the technologies, which is an important step in being able to make value-adding decisions in business and as a result would recommend the book.
The second part to this book is much shorter and covers focus points to help business adapt and thrive. Again for someone who already works in the tech industry this is not going to be ground breaking. If your business runs the risk of going the same way of Xerox then this will help envisage a road map for staying relevant. The three chapters in this section cover Automation, Data utilisation and the Future Employment. It covers a wide array of examples and helps deconstruct how technology features in nearly every avenue of a businesses decision making processes.
One of the interesting take home points from this part was how it highlighted modern tech businesses outstripping traditional businesses by gaining insights from big data. If your business doesn’t currently use data analytics to understand your industry, customer base or competitors and made available to key decision makers then you’re already at a disadvantage.
The third part of this book is lessons from industry on a sector by sector basis. This includes chapters on Healthcare, Transportation, Retail, Logistics, Factories and Construction. If you’re just starting your ‘innovation to stay relevant’ journey then this section will provide a spring board for change, with examples to include in business proposals and presentations.
To summarise, if you’re in an established business and not sure how you’re going to compete in the following decade this book will be a great starting point. The book paints a positive picture of how technology can be used to improve the world we live in and opportunities to keep businesses current and valued by customers.
This book is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US
