Lizzie Jingyuan Wu

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Are you prepared for digital disruption? Thanks to the storm of cloud, analytics, mobility and a cluster of emerging technologies, it is predicted by Cisco that average time to a disruption is shortened, more precisely, 3.1 years across 12 industries. But how much do we really know about digital disruption? Is it another buzzword, another hyped IT fashion? Is this all there is to it?

First and foremost, what is the difference between digital transformation and digital disruption? It came as no surprise that people have mistaken one for another. Digital transformation puts the emphasis on adopting digital technologies to the current business model with an aim to quantify and improve its performance. While digital disruption also indeed affects the company’s business model, the effect is not planned and the consequence might be much more complicated. Digital disruption forcefully changes a company’s value proposition and its market position.

This vortex represents digital disruption;

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Firstly, more center the industry’s position is, the more competition there is.

Secondly, the movement towards the center is highly chaotic, namely, a peripheral industry can be on the outlier one moment then it will be drawn into the center next moment, the path is almost impossible to predict.

What is more interesting about this graph is that it raises a point of “combinatorial innovation”. The term “combinatorial innovation”, it is defined by Cisco (2015) as follows:

“the decomposition of value sources into constituent digital parts that are then recombined—enabling the invention of not only the next generation of technologies but also different types of breakthroughs in the form of new business models”. This kind of disruptor has a profound impact on a company’s sources of value since the disruptor works on multiple levels as a result of being a hybrid invention. More specifically, company thus should look out for its impact on three values: cost, experience, and platform.

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Raising awareness and being able to tell the difference between digital disruption and digital transformation will contribute to a more responsive and effective strategy.

Reference:

Cisco. 2015. Digital Vortex How Digital Disruption Is Redefining Industries. Available on https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/industry-solutions/digital-vortex-report.pdf

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the notion of “autonomous vehicles” (AV) or at least, assisted driving is nothing new. It can be dated back to the 1970s. In the 1980s Navlab research vehicle is arguably the forefather of what we have witnessed today. The question is then, why now? What is the window of opportunity for autonomous vehicles? In recent years, there has been an exponential growth of commercial activities in the field of autonomous vehicles. In addition to what has already been brought to the market such as Tesla Model S and Volvo XC90, just to list some state of the art, in late August this year, Toyata invested 500 million dollars in Uber driverless cars. Almost at the same time, Waymo set out to design and test its own driverless cars in China. Drawing upon my far-from-rigorous investigation, the reasons are two folded with one being technical, another being social.

Let’s talk about the first category, the technical side of the story; advances in computer vision have helped tremendously. Although this is a first-timer revolutionary technology, it is critical in autonomous driving. As one of the most influential works of Geiger et al. noted, computer vision is the backbone for driving tasks, namely, this technology is aiming for object detection and 3D orientation estimation. Additionally, Google’s success of its self-driving cars exemplified AV’s potentials, this directly resulted in massive media coverage on this topic, consequently, huge investments were made in R&D.

Add to that, the improvement of image recognition and speed of processing all contribute to AV’s steady progress. Don’t forget, we are living in a world of connectivity, innovation in one industry may well spill over to other industries. On a broader scope, giants like Intel, Ericsson, Qualcomm are investing heavily in 5G network which allows cars to communicate with each other without any delays. Advances in machine learning can improve car’s capability to, for example, understand road environment.

Secondly, driving is social. It is just about cars moving around, it is also about drivers, the road, the purpose of a commute. More specifically, we are humans, we enshrine the fundamental right of movement laid down by the EU.

Yeah.

We are humans and our life is hurried in the ear of globalization, we have places to be, work to do, people to meet, views to see. Today’s social networks are becoming ever complex, the need for leisure and efficiency is growing. So is the need to be “connected”. This entails scheduling, route planning. AV is precisely here for it and probably will go above and beyond.

The social aspect of driving raises an interesting question, what is left with driving if humans are not the ones doing it? For a lot of people, driving is more than departure and arrival. It is also about meaningful human interactions, interactions with the driving environment. Driving without a purpose, knowing the road, yelling at other drivers, parking well, jamming along while hands on the wheels are the pleasures to be reduced by AV.

I think customers’ acceptance will shape the future outlook greatly, of course, this is influenced by multiple factors, that is, it is not merely the technology itself will affect customers, but also factors like pricing structure, regulatory powers so on and so forth.

What do you think, why now? what will have an impact on the future of autonomous cars?

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Reference:

Brown, B., & Laurier, E. (2017). The Trouble with Autopilots. Proceedings Of The 2017 CHI Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems – CHI ’17. doi: 10.1145/3025453.3025462

Fairfield, N., & Urmson, C. (2011). Traffic light mapping and detection. 2011 IEEE International Conference On Robotics And Automation. doi: 10.1109/icra.2011.5980164

Geiger, A., Lenz, P., & Urtasun, R. (2012). Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite. 2012 IEEE Conference On Computer Vision And Pattern Recognition. doi: 10.1109/cvpr.2012.6248074

Supercharged connected future powers ahead of customer enthusiasm | Financial Times. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/15c43d7a-8036-11e8-af48-190d103e32a4

Toyota invests $500m in Uber driverless car partnership | Financial Times. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/1ca02574-aa2e-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c

Waymo sets up Chinese unit in new sign of Alphabet’s expansion | Financial Times. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/6706ccc8-a75c-11e8-8ecf-a7ae1beff35b

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