My three takeaways from the 2016 Web Summit in Lisbon
The Web Summit has just ended and while I still feel on high voltage, super charged by this incredible energy and abundance of talent, I want to share my reflection after stage 1 of my WW Digitour.
SW leads and HW is back
No doubt that platforms, apps, analytics lead the world and the start-up growth. HW however is back and sexy again with the rise of VR, robots, machine learning and IOT sensors. This creates for start-up very traditional challenges with regard to sourcing, manufacturing and logistics. I was privileged to mentor very successful start-ups at different stages of their life cycle. They were confronted with very traditional production or logistic issues because of the HW component of their solution
Agriculture meets Tech
For countries in Europe like Portugal where farming is fragmented gaining productivity is key. The most successful solutions I saw at the summit where the ones combining several technologies combining renewable energy, nanotech, analytics. Coming from the tech world with farmer ancestors like many Europeans I will explore on my Digitour how agriculture transforms through digitization.
The digital ecosystem needs bridges
With the growing complexity and the need for start-ups to scale quickly fluidity is the key.
Investment money needs to find its way to breakthrough ideas and business models wherever they are, brick and mortar entrepreneurs need to transfer their knowledge to young entrepreneurs and vice versa, traditional knowledge needs to input into algorithm and analytics.
Incubators, accelerators spread all over to build these bridges and events such as the web summit play a key role in this dynamic ecosystem. Yet for a successful digital transformation we all need to connect more so that all components or our economy and society benefit from it. I personally think that we face a Darwinian scenario what will not evolve will disappear, we just have less time.
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