PROLOG
We have progressed as a civilization by learning from nature and created science and mathematics to understand its functioning. In doing so we have tapped into Earth’s resources to mine, drill, cultivate and forage; built large metropolises, traversed the seas, learned to fly and enabled communications. Our consternations as peoples have also manifested as wars which have only intensified in magnitude with our technological prowess.
Today, as we plan our next iteration as a civilization, there is need to reflect on our checkered past – to glean the good from the bad, the possible from the improbable, the basics and the fundamentals. We need to understand the complexity of the systems that we are undertaking to build, so that as we progress, we account for the knowns and unknowns, and are mindful of its workings and the consequences. There is this push to escape from earth and its problems, but as carbon-based entities are we fit to live beyond our earthly confines? Can we build systems to do this that are purpose driven, safe and effective; and yet enable us to stay true to our cherished belief of freedom?
The fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, revolves around automation and data exchange, and a wide range of manufacturing technologies form the core of its functioning in the world of business. While many manufacturers are still busy developing methods for interconnecting new technologies to improve efficiency and productivity — the guiding principle behind Industry 4.0 — the next phase of industrialization is already upon us.
The vision of Industry and Services 5.0 recognizes the power of industry to achieve societal goals beyond jobs and growth, to become a resilient provider of prosperity by making production respect the boundaries of the planet and place the well-being of the human at the center of the process. It emphasizes on sustainability, human-centricity, and resilience along with all the tenets that defined Industry 4.0 and the revolutions prior to it. It moves focus from solely shareholder value to stakeholder enablement, for all concerned. Version 5.0 recognizes that man and machine must be interconnected to meet the manufacturing complexity of the future in dealing with increasing commercialization through an optimized robotized manufacturing process – what we call custom manufactory.
At every stage of our industrialization, we added more and different processes to automate the production process thus increasing its complexity so that today we need specialized machines and high-end computers to manage the systems. The plethora of data generated by these processes now needs to be managed so that it can be used to improve the performance of the systems. This is where data science comes in. Data science is the process of managing and extracting value from data. Data science is the application of mathematics, statistics, and computer science to data so that insights can be gleaned, and decisions made.
In this article, we will define our purpose, mission, vision, and goals to provide a unified, clear, and prescient view for our progression.
THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
Innovation is hard!
Imagining the future requires intense planning. In today’s world we need to link and inter-twine heterogeneous systems, make them interoperable, aggregate data and provide pertinent information at the right time and the right place with flexibility and ease of use.
Also, building a begin-to-end (or what is typically referred to as a cradle-to-grave) ecosystem is extremely difficult. It entails integrating heterogeneous systems, data, and people together. Re-engineered brown-field initiatives to correspond to the new services is expensive and difficult.
A green-field approach is sometime desirable by starting afresh by building a platform from ground up. An example of this green-field development in the recent past is how Tesla Motors, a new entrant in the auto industry who after only 10+ years in the domain has become a trillion-dollar company, wealthier than all of the other automotive companies combined. Albeit not perfect – they still have a lot of issues when it comes to service and support – they initially created a master plan and have followed it for two versions to stick to their purpose of building compelling next products following a theme of “the machine to build the machine” as how Elon Musk “eloquently” puts it.
Future-proofing designs for such endeavors entails creating blueprints that move beyond current 2D and simplistic 3D animations, to constructs that morph – dynamically change, evolve, and articulate with the conditions and the environment, and are embedded with intelligence that will learn, consider, and rationalize.
CURRENT STATE
In recent years, new technologies such as 3D printing, additive manufacturing, and the widespread availability of (fast) Internet access enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) have changed or will change the technological environment in which firms operate. Systems like Cloud Computing, Big Data and Analytics, AI and ML, Digital Thread and Digital Twin, and Spatial Computing (AR/VR/XR) are already being used in all new architectures, and technologies like Distributed Ledger using Blockchain are showing a lot of promise. New types of business models such as platform-based or app-based business models have emerged, leading to the creation of innovative and highly disruptive start-ups like Spotify, Skype, Airbnb, Uber, etc., which have challenged the business models of established firms.
Innovation is no longer only about the product or the process, but now includes the entire business model. Business model innovation is often successfully implemented by start-ups, while incumbent firms experience problems with disruptive innovations that end up cannibalizing their existing business models. These new technological trends and the resulting business model innovations represent an interesting area of research for the innovative entrepreneurship literature.
Exemplary research questions include the following:
- How do new technologies such as 3D printing and IoT change the ability of start-ups to disrupt industries and markets?
- How does the cooperation between start-ups and incumbent firms change as a result of the diffusion of disruptive technologies?
- Which skills and personality traits of founders are most effective in leading start-ups that challenge existing business models?
BUSINESS PROPOSITION
“All you see is the order and plan from up here, and the unrealized potential paths for everyone” – Westworld
At Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO), we enable infrastructures, manage adaptive engineering and manufacturing, harmonize processes, and create smart, connected, and sustainable products – all managed appropriately and with intent.
Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy dating back three millennia and translates as a ‘reason for being’. It helps people get clear on their purpose in life, leading to wellbeing and satisfaction. For companies, it helps understand the different forces to rebuild more resilient, sustainable businesses. In this article of Everything Connected, we look at how we used the ikigai principles to clarify and align business purpose for people, planet, and profit.
Our Business Proposition Canvas illustrated above defines our Purpose in an Ikigai based map. It overlaps Customer Expectation with the qualified Background of our personnel to provide muscle to our company’s Vision to Commercialize. Our solutions, products & services are the outcome of our intense passion and mission that define our Master Plan created in perfect cadence to the build of the operating model of the company for Industry and Services 5.0. Here is a detailed explanation of our key purpose domains:
Expectation corresponds to the Customers wants, needs, experiences and future anticipations that would be the key driver for the products and services. Some of these could be in the realm of “known-unknowns” as we utilize intelligent analysis to predict them.
Background is “known-knowns” that we will leverage to start up the basis of the company. This would include the expertise and experience of the team we create, the partnerships and associations we will develop and the capacity to research of composing new materials, articulations and cybernetic technologies that will be the hallmark of our existence.
Vision is the projected path that we will set forth as the progression mode for the company – to utilize intelligent techniques to build smart, connected, and sustainable products by pushing the edges of engineering, technology, data management, AI, and cybernetics. Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with regulatory and purposive systems.
Commercialization is about revenue generation, of profit, employee pay, expenses and also accounting for future research and development. In our case it will be right sizing our solutions to be viable for both production at scale and to be sold with intent.
Experience (doers) is the Intellectual Capital, the building of the people needed to have the correct mojo of background and marketing sense and Passion is for thinkers who can research, and articulate future renderings based on their unique background to visualize.
Mission is the intersect of Vision and Expectation and is a terse compact message about the go-forward plan of the company that alludes to the overall master plan.
Product & Services are the outcome of the Mission Statement and the Master Plan created in perfect cadence to the build of the operating model of the company. Our prerogative is to create usable, viable, sensible, and intelligent products, services, and solutions.
The goal of NUMO is to merge engineering and technology together and provide a synthetic cybernetic fabric for the current Industrial Revolution and beyond, where products and services will be a coordinated mix of physical, digital and (even) biological processes with customer enablement being key with human centric design, smart and intelligent capabilities, and custom adaptable features.
We provide the basis for make, manage, move, market, and maintain of solutions, products, and services to automate processes in the realm of Industry and Services 5.0. We want to be leaders in our next forays – with Web3 and the Metaverse and provide for that appropriate mélange between digital and physical to enable cybernetic automation in all aspects of process control.
Our Mission Statement: To provide a synthetic ecosystem that facilitates smart manufacturing, and build smart and connected products and solutions to prove and improve the ecosystem.
We are partnering with select organizations, platform providers, industry leaders and academic institutions to help realize a robust connected ecosystem by:
- Utilizing an end-to-end business and technical architecture blueprint that will enable us to define use cases,
- Exploiting adjacencies and optimizing information flow across domains by using Big Data, Cloud provisioning, Web services API gateways and IoT,
- Making products that surprise, excite and delight by using AI/ML and Spatial Computing (AR/VR/XR) technologies, and
- Developing solutions that are secure, reliable, scalable, and resilient by using cyber-secure protocols
in our progression as a civilization to build robust infrastructures of the future.
The systems and the products that we envisage will:
- utilize high-tech, advanced materials, actionable intelligence, and proactive response capabilities
- use AI driven mechanisms and real-time feedback.
- be built upon a strong foundation based on our partnerships with Microsoft, MSC Software, Hexagon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and other leading cloud platform, engineering systems and integration service providers.
SUMMARY
Our progression via the different phases of the Industrial Revolution has urbanized our societies. Technology has brought about far-reaching changes in the way we live but has also created complicated systems that need to communicate with each other and with us. This has created a lot of friction, duplicated information, latency in communication and fractured user experience. The plethora of data and the myriad sources have also prevented proper understanding of cause to analyze to get the appropriate solutions (effect) especially when we are using AI/ML mechanisms to train systems. Metaverse and Web3 are putting a new perspective on digital and the interaction between cyber-physical systems. With emerging technologies (Distributed Ledger, Actionable Intelligence, Realities – Spatial Computing for AR/VR/XR and Quantum Computing), Additive Manufacturing and others there is need to also have a blue-sky approach for innovation rather than the traditional brown-field (retrofitting existing) and green-field (doing the old with new tech) implementations.
Imagining the future requires intense planning. In today’s world we need to link and intertwine heterogeneous systems, make them interoperable, aggregate data, and provide pertinent information at the right time and the right place with flexibility and ease of use. The events of 2020 and the COVID pandemic debacle taught us that we weren’t prepared and caught the world off guard. It has in no small measure changed the footprint of our step in our progress as a civilization. It has defined new knowns and created more unknowns. It has made the case for good and thorough planning ever so pertinent.
The progression of an enterprise needs the correct understanding of invention, innovation, entrepreneurship, and business savviness. Re-imagining the future in this new paradigm requires looking beyond artifact creation and invention, to engineering systems that are nimble, flexible, and adaptable to the changing needs of the customer and the world. They should keep in step with the progression of technology, our new understanding of the universe we live in and our self-introspection of who we are. It should also account for all our inalienable rights, be mindful of our place in history, of our position amongst the living and the particles that constitute our being. As we progress from invention to innovation to entrepreneurship, and finally to an enterprise that means business, we want to leave no stone unturned in our journey. The right infusion of capital in all our stages of growth would facilitate our themed advancement into the realms of the future – of Industry and Services 5.0 and the connected technology that it entails.
We at Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) are firmly committed to providing for this next revolution of Industry and Services 5.0 by creating an end-to-end reference architecture. Reference architectures have long been accepted as a set of recommended structures and integrations of products and services to form a solution that embodies accepted industry best practices, typically suggesting the optimal delivery method for specific technologies. They provide a frame of reference for building systems or enacting a digital transformation within an established enterprise. Using a reference architecture saves time and resources by allowing teams to avoid reinventing the wheel and to execute a plan in an efficient and economical way.
NI+IN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist