EDITORIAL: The future will be informed by how we keep up with innovation

At the height of the first industrial revolution in the mid to late 18th Century, Britain, then the most industrialized country in the world, for fear that it might lose that coveted position, enacted legislation that banned the exportation of its technology and skilled manpower. It failed in the attempt to monopolise industrial knowhow and that failure worked in the world’s favour. The sharing of knowledge and technology promoted innovation and continuous upgrades and, as a result, technology became affordable to many. Today the world is a massive tech village. That is exactly what the just concluded World Economic Forum (WEF) on Africa was all about; bringing the Fourth Industrial Revolution to your doorstep. In the very near future, countries that lag behind in digital savvy will not make it around the next economic development corner. Many technologically advanced countries had moved their production abroad, to countries that had cheap but skilled labour, thereby causing a steep rise in unemployment in their backyard. Even with governments subsidizing manufacturers to prop up domestic production and save jobs, the incentive was still not very enticing.With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, governments can now sleep easy as factories could soon move back to major western capitals as manufacturing will no longer need cheap labour but smart technology. The die has been cast; it will now depend on who is ready to grab the digitization opportunity. As the Economist magazine once predicted in 2012, it was becoming more and more difficult to differentiate between manufacturing and services. It gave an example of a famous aircraft engine manufacturer: “Rolls-Royce no longer sells jet engines; it sells the hours that each engine is actually thrusting an aeroplane through the sky”. That now, is a true industrial revolution.

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EDITORIAL: The future will be informed by how we keep up with innovation