Time to disrupt the industry! (Again)

Technology and innovation have disrupted the way we experience, provide and consume services. Now it’s time to disrupt industrial processes!

Last weekend I had an exciting opportunity to mentor at the Smart Industry hackathon in Tallinn. The hackathon focused on digitalizing industrial processes, which created an excellent opportunity for me to learn about various manufacturing industries.

So why Industry 4.0? Why do we need yet another industrial revolution? Digital innovation continues to disrupt the services industry whether we talk about the sharing economy or fintech. However, that’s not the case with all industrial processes.

Seamless solutions save money and time at every step of the production chain

My team of Nortalists experienced it first-hand at UPM Industry Hack last year, where we were baffled at the high cost of ineffective communication. Apparently, digitalization has left industrial processes almost untouched, as some of the most trivial processes cost businesses time and money.

While digitalization helps industries to minimize human error it also maximizes production efficiency. Furthermore, connecting seamlessly all the links in the production chain through digitalization will create a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Logistics assembly – just a fancy word for Tetris?

As all the participants came to the hackathon with existing solutions and business models, we could get right to work. The majority of these ideas and solutions were developed based on the participant’s prior knowledge and experience in their respective fields.

When advising the teams, I challenged them to apply service design alongside user experience, user interface and graphic design principles. Once you incorporate the principles of service design and user experience into your solution, it will help your clients to save heaps of time and money.

The Smart Industry hackathon created an excellent platform for developers to receive feedback and improve their ideas. Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to witness genuine potential and out-of-the-box thinking in action.

One of the most exciting projects at the hackathon was definitely an intuitive 3D game, which would allow people everywhere to assemble parcels of various sizes and shapes into shipments. In return – users would earn points and/or awards.

On one hand, it is essentially a gamified Tetris-like version of logistics assembly. Yet on the other hand, a machine learning system is crowdsourcing user-generated data in order to develop its own intuition.