Industrieën rijp voor verstoring

Wie bepaalt de toekomst? Hier zijn 5 bedrijfstakken die open zijn voor verstoring.

Ik heb onlangs een artikel geschreven over bedrijven die niet de industrie uitvonden, maar degenen waren die het opnieuw moesten uitvinden en uiteindelijk bezitten. Veel van hun succes kan worden toegeschreven aan het opnieuw verzinnen van een stilstaande industrie en als een van de eersten zijn om op dat cruciale moment in te springen.

Nu wil ik enkele belangrijke veelbelovende sectoren onder de aandacht brengen die hun eigen "Uber" nog moeten hebben om hun toekomst opnieuw te bepalen.

1. Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies are famous with their overall meteoric rise and short-term rollercoaster volatility but they’re more than assets to make a quick buck on crypto exchanges. The truly revolutionary idea lies in the potential of a decentralized database. The reason people crowded around cryptocurrency in the first place is because of the promise to upend the centralized banking system with its globally distributed ledger, or the underlying blockchain technology.

The implications go beyond financial because the distributed database doesn’t have to be a ledger. It could possibly distribute and authenticate any sort information. Some things that are already being experimented include domain registries, file storage, and music distribution. The ones to really take it beyond fintech and popularize intersectoral applications will be the real market leader in the technology’s maturity. Ethereum built new “smart contracts" which can automatically authenticate, trigger and record access. It remains to be seen who develops blockchains that deliver on the promises to potentially alter practically every industry.

2. Drones

The Drone industry is growing quickly. They’re getting smaller, more powerful, steadier, and safer. With significant strides in defense and intelligence industries as well as increasing democratization in videography. But let’s be honest, they’re still expensive toys at best, for most.

Across the board, drones suffer from price, safety, application, and privacy issues. These barriers, which are matters of hardware, software, and legality, are what keep even current industry leaders on their toes. Amazon is testing drone delivery services, Intel is clearly developing flight coordination algorithms (last year’s Super Bowl and this year’s CES), and DJI has managed to nearly completely box-out competitors in compactness and stability.

But none are safely dominant.

Potential is tremendous in rescue, security, entertainment, logistics, agriculture, meteorology, and countless others that have captured our imagination. Drones are itching for someone to come in and truly define how things are done.

3. Home Appliances

These all sound cool, but disruption is often most pervasive when it happens in the mundane. What is more mundane than the home?

Refrigerators, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, and air conditioning transformed our daily lives forever. But when’s the last time something changed the home so radically? Sure, the biggest trend appears to be a network of integrated smart home appliances. But there has yet to be an appliance that fundamentally changes how we live every day like the refrigerator. These technologies have changed little in decades but were responsible for massive changes in economic participation, health, urban growth, among countless other aspects of life. We’re sorely due for something new that allows us to gain substantial amounts of space and time.

4. Energy

Energy is an unsexy industry, and for a while, there has been little to be excited about. After all, the majority of the industry has been dominated by decades-old juggernauts. But now they’re undergoing major shakeups that could potentially see a shift in the status quo. Of course, attention has been centered intensely on renewables as they become cheaper. But the industry still lacks a reliable way source of energy that completely reimagines the way we source, transport, and use, energy. At the end of the day, they’re all just pushing electrons through a wire.

Improved methods of managing systems, data analytics, and automation have already begun to make fossil fuels cheaper and energy grids increasingly more efficient.

Disruption awaits at the intersection of renewable energy and reimagined energy grid systems. Energy grid development is moving toward increasingly smaller systems, such as micro-grids that independently power military bases, or nano-grids that power Walmarts. With better batteries, fuel cells, or solar panels, we may see the introduction of even smaller pico-grids for businesses and homes.

5. Transportation

There has already been a lot of disruptive innovations in transportation, most notably from sharing economies. But there are still countless problems waiting to be solved and technological and design solutions within grasp. Pollution, safety, time and space for traffic and parking, and simply quicker and more affordable transit options remain unchanged for years.

The latest arena is autonomous vehicles. There’s no clear leader and companies from both auto-manufacturing and web-software developing sectors are racing desperately to get to be the ones to define the future. In a matter of half a decade, the world has accepted the era of car-ownership is nearing its twilight and the thing to be is a “mobility provider." Opening an ecosystem of sensor and chip manufacturers, data compression, system tracking services, service centers, and countless peripheral businesses we won’t know will exist until they do.