Welcome to the Industrial Age 4.0, an era defined not only by its revolutionary technological achievements, but also regarded as a brand-new chapter in social life.
This is no ordinary industrial revolution, but an age of significant social change, in which technology, economy, and society interact in unprecedented ways.
In the context of today’s world, the durability of products and software is rapidly declining, and so is the durability of demand. Suddenly, we navigate through an increasingly complex world, where we often lose our bearings and wonder where the journey is going.
Many perceive our era as a crisis, but paradoxically, it is precisely the crisis that can offer us direction. In the endless cycle of realignment and crises, we can find both orientation and inspiration for new business fields.
Let’s consider the slanting 8 model, inspired by evolutionary economist Carlotta Perez. This represents the incessant cycle between crisis and invention and reminds us that we are constantly in a cycle and always heading towards a new crisis.
In this model, three phases are crucial: Expansion, Confusion, and Innovation.
In the expansion phase, rapid growth, the dissemination, and adaptation of innovation, as well as creativity, are the focus, while complexity is reduced – this is currently the case with LLMs (like Chat GPT). This phase inevitably leads to confusion, characterized by confusion and chaos, and ends again in a crisis. We can observe this very well with the spread of fake news, which brings a demand for fake detection – thus, simplification.
Certainly, with each crisis, new inventions and opportunities come into the world.
These inventions lead to new behaviors, fashions, trends, and even entire cultures, which I call human resonance to crises.
Take, for example, our love for stories, ignited by the first human innovation, the discovery of fire, when our ancestors were no longer forced to hide in caves. When our ancestors no longer needed to fear the saber-toothed tiger, they began to tell hero stories of the day’s hunting experiences at night. This effect echoes to this day when we give more belief to stories than facts.
So, what does a crisis mean?
The Chinese character, representing a mixture of danger and opportunity, hits the mark. A crisis is a new reality to which we must adapt. With every innovation, like the Internet, we resonate, use it intensively, and a phase of great complexity follows.
In such times, people yearn for simplification, a desire that in the age of globalization has led to the rise of national parties in Europe.
In this cycle, in my view, two crucial opportunities for new business fields open up.
1) We could stop focusing on demand and target groups and focus on the innovation itself to know the next demand and align our action accordingly. It’s worth looking at the world’s research forges and asking, “what could we do with this invention?”
This allows us to focus on the innovations themselves and explore business fields based on human resonance.
Had we done this, for example, with the invention of the Internet, we could have predicted the boom of social media, a business field that today belongs to the largest of our time.
2) On the other hand, the overwhelming complexity and the resulting need for simplification also open up business opportunities.
Here we must ask ourselves, which invention is becoming too complex? What is or could become an overwhelming task?
A current example is that people, because of the flood of fake news and fake images, are seeking simplification. We could offer services that satisfy this need, in this case, fake detection.
According to the philosopher Luciano Floridi, we always need a reference point to understand information. Human demand has served its time as a reference point in the age of digitization, as it changes as quickly as the world.
In this rapid and complex world, where the durability of products and services is becoming ever more short-lived, we can use the crisis itself and the inventions it brings forth as a reference point.
In this way, we will learn which new realities it can create on the markets of tomorrow.
It is the crises themselves that offer us orientation in complexity and let us explore opportunities, both for our lives and for innovative business fields.
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