Читать книгу The Exponential Era - David Espindola - Страница 15

As of this writing, according to CB Insights, there were more than 400 private companies valued above one billion dollars.⁷ They are part of the Global Unicorn Club. What is remarkable is that most of these companies are recently formed, technology‐based enterprises. They run the entire spectrum of technologies from Security to eCommerce, Internet Services, Artificial Intelligence, and so on. These are the companies that are able to take advantage of the huge opportunities converging technologies in the Exponential Era represent.

And we are just scratching the surface of what is coming. The economic opportunities to be generated by the creation, rapid adoption, and convergence of emerging technologies is truly extraordinary. According to the World Economic Forum there has been no historic precedent to this current phenomenon, which is also referred to as the 4th Industrial Revolution, in terms of its velocity, scope, and impact on everything in our lives.⁸ You would have to go back to the late 1800s and early 1900s to see just three significant innovation platforms come together over several decades: electricity, the telephone, and the internal combustion engine.

Today there are at least 10 of these platforms, depending on how you categorize them, that have surfaced in the last few decades: Biotechnology, Nanotechnology, Autonomous Vehicles, Robotics, 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and the Next Generation Internet. The latter contains several sub‐components such as Mobile Payment, Internet of Things (IoT), Online‐to‐Offline (O2O), and 5G. We will discuss many of these platforms in detail in Chapter 2.

These platforms are generating entirely new ecosystems and multi‐trillion‐dollar economies. Their convergences are creating a combinatorial power that is spawning ever‐increasing innovation and economic opportunities and threats across the globe. For example, today we see China leapfrogging to modern technologies like O2O, machine learning, and mobile payment. The latter has created a cashless ecosystem that has grown to 24 trillion dollars, almost twice the size of China's GDP. When these synergistic technologies with multi‐trillion‐dollar scope start converging and feeding on each other as we see in China, the explosive scale, scope, and speed of the Exponential Era become frighteningly obvious.⁹

There are many imminent threats to slow‐moving companies that insist on operating on outdated business models or are incapable of adapting to fast‐moving changes. But there are also enormous opportunities for both incumbents and newly formed enterprises that see the inflection points before they happen. Today's opportunity, if left untapped, can turn into tomorrow's threat, or as we like to say, “the difference between a threat and an opportunity is the time horizon in which you see it.”¹⁰