Make your move into Augmented Innovation
What’s the remedy for slow economic growth? This year’s G20 Summit believes it’s innovation. ICT enablers are spreading innovation to all countries – and increasingly into the hands of individuals. Economies are turning digital, and the age of Augmented Innovation is coming. We’re not there yet, but ICT and AI are turning the key and the door is opening.
Leveling up digital maturity
As countries reach full connectivity, the era of Augmented Innovation will arrive. Cloud, big data analytics, IoT, and AI will achieve a scale of innovation and economic digitalization never before possible – one that transcends physical barriers and the limits of the human mind, where humans and machines achieve more together than either can alone.
This is a picture painted in Huawei’s Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016 report, Connect Where It Counts. The study identifies four stages of digital maturity: Foundation, Internet, Data, and Augmented – the stage no country has reached yet. GCI 2016 estimates that the first augmented innovators will arrive around 2020.
The top ranking countries in GCI 2016 – the US, Singapore, and Sweden – are likely to be the first nations to arrive if they keep up their current development momentum. At that time, big data analytics will be ubiquitous and embedded into IoT systems, and used to empower machine-assisted innovation in the form of virtual assistants, advanced robotics, and probably other things we haven’t yet thought of.
While many forms of innovation might already qualify as machine-assisted, the difference is that conventional forms of innovation will use machines and AI in the process. The scale of innovation will increase and barriers will be lowered. Features include:
- Processing information too complex for human attentions spans and distilling it into insights that humans can perceive and use.
- Tackling problems too tedious, repetitive, time-consuming, complicated or otherwise onerous for humans to solve.
- Providing accurate modeling, simulation, and predictions through the IoT-enabled consideration of all possible factors.
- Enabling more intuitive interaction so that innovation can be carried out by people with physical disabilities or people without specialized skills – innovation will no longer be for geeks and coders, it’ll be for everyone.
In the Augmented Innovation era, innovation will still be based on data analysis, but it will be accelerated by data sets complete enough for machines to start contributing insights, taking innovation to a whole new level.
Imagine the near future, when this level of machine-enhanced innovation is applied widely in manufacturing, finance, education, agriculture, and literally all walks of life, it will create a veritable big bang of growth in innovation and productivity.
This won’t arrive automatically. Nations and enterprises need to invest in and promote five technology enablers: broadband, data centers, cloud, big data, and IoT. Combined, these form the digital infrastructure for competitiveness, innovation, and productivity.
With broadband and data centers in place, developed markets are shifting their focus to cloud, big data, and IoT, which is pushing them into the Augmented Innovation stage. Nations that are late to the party risk being left behind in the digital economic landscape.
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