Beyond Industry 4.0 - Building the Internet of Production

Editor’s Note: Nicolai Peitersen, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Wikifactory

As a European who has been living in China for over eight years but frequently travelling to the US, Denmark and Spain, I have seen first hand how the COVID-19 crisis developed across different regions in the world.

However, no crisis is ever a discrete event, and never exists in isolation. It shows existing fault lines, which we paper over at our peril as we rush to return to normality. But you cannot rebuild after an earthquake along the same lines in the same way. By a similar analogy, you cannot rebuild a global ecosystem without implementing new measures for resilience going forward.

What is needed is a systemic approach that reviews policy and governance, business management and global trade with fresh eyes to evaluate what should be kept and what can be built upon further or even changed completely.

Already advances in ICT have created virtual realities, empowered giants of innovation, and encouraged our era to believe it had transcended the physical realm. But it took a microscopic virus to bring us down to earth. Ideas still flowed freely along the information highways, but the physical products needed most urgently couldn’t move quickly enough to save more lives. Supply chains are linear, and centralised, and dependent on borders that have closed. Our locked-in Intellectual Property model delays the deployment of vital innovation by restricting its circulation and potential for impact.

Now, more than ever, we need to accelerate building The Internet of Production. Digital technology and virtual networks can transcend physical constraints but to make them effective, we need to put in place a joined-up infrastructure that enables free circulation and globalises innovation to allow for local production of physical things.

A community facing a shared crisis, with a global technological infrastructure at its disposal must, and can, transcend these borders. The developed nations will solve their problems with existing models, but the developing world, with weak health systems, must be equipped and empowered, with low-cost, safe and scalable solutions to respond and build resilience against the threat that affects us all (and which can return in the future).

We have awakened finally to our fragile dependencies and been given a glimpse of the physical necessity lived by millions every day.

In the open source upsurge we’ve witnessed a vast global community of untapped ingenuity step forward to solve real problems, collaboratively and with purpose. The open hardware community of product developers, engineers, innovators and problem solvers has already designed and manufactured more than 50 million Covid-19 supplies since March last year, including PPE, medical devices, and is now looking ahead at innovation to future-proof our built environment.

All this innovation and supply was enabled even though the majority were locked inside their homes. But their ideas and energies were harnessed and directed through a networked digital infrastructure that proved resilient to lockdowns and the constraints imposed by a compromised global supply chain. Ethical hackers and makers made the headlines and became heroes, offering a glimpse of an alternative resource of open innovation and collaboration, purpose-fit to solve problems at a local level, through low-cost distributed manufacturing capability.

Against a backdrop of national governments serving national interests there emerges the validity and viability of a different spirit and possibility going forward. When Eric Schmidt issued his call for new profound technologies to affect a paradigm shift, he claimed we were currently constrained by the limits of our understanding. We may now have broken through those limits, and can achieve the profound change he claimed was needed.

Technology can definitively empower the alignment between business and purpose, and can bring together what is currently fragmented, isolated or linear, by creating an infrastructure and ecosystem for measurable and meaningful Impact.

Much has been made of the 4th Industrial Revolution in Europe, the US and China. Industry 4.0 is an acknowledgement that manufacturing can be modernised through an effort by large corporations to try to make their existing models work with greater use of machine learning, simulation, etc. The story industry is telling itself is that in an era of AI or machine learning, companies are going to be able to retain their dominance and profits, so long as they undergo what is called a ‘digital transformation’.

But it sounds strange to most as the common man would assume that, for example, cars are designed on high-end CAD software, factories are planned using simulation software, and parts are produced using complex digital machines. In short, these organisations and their operations are already extremely digitised.

On close inspection, Industry 4.0 is only about domain linkages between different digital systems. So, companies are looking to integrate their digital systems better to operate more efficiently. This is an internet-based transformation not a digital transformation.

Meanwhile, we have spent the best part of the last decade talking about the Internet of Things. Connecting devices to improve our lives. This is a solution that satisfies a want, rather than a need. What we need instead is an Internet of Production. A decentralised system of manufacturing on-demand, through the internet, where it’s most needed. One that is not just crisis-ready, but future-fit.

What if product companies of all sizes were connected directly to a marketplace of manufacturers in a single online system? What if there was a way to no longer rely on global supply chains that are either slow, shut down or inefficient right now?

If we could build a single online infrastructure into which we were able to plug in every element of the supply chain, and which would also allow Big Industry, individual engineers, and all sizes of factories to collaborate, design, prototype and manufacture on-demand, at scale, and exactly where the products are needed, wouldn’t that be a much bigger industrial transformation than Industry 4.0?

This is not a marginal economic development. There is a whole new breed of companies developing solutions along a distributed value chain. For decades, engineering and manufacturing software has been dominated by large enterprises like Autodesk, Dassault Systems and Siemens. Offering complete software solutions but at a prohibitive cost for smaller companies, making industry standard software largely inaccessible to smaller but innovative companies.

With the advent of cloud computing, social networks and digital fabrication, we are now seeing the rise of accessible, innovative solutions such as web collaboration software companies being developed by startups for very specific parts of the value chain, including Thangs, a 3D model community with geometric search, Propel PLM, cloud-native PLM software, and GrabCAD, the largest CAD model site.

And we are also seeing a rise in on-demand manufacturing companies, including Fictiv, which provides custom mechanical parts from a private manufacturer network, Xometry, an instant quoting / fin-tech for private supplier network, and MFG, a request for quote (RFQ) distribution service to publicly listed manufacturers, which was a first mover in this space in 2005 and is backed by Jeff Bezos.

Because what is happening right now is a much bigger transformation than what is described by Industry 4.0., along with other innovative and progressive businesses, we must now all work together to make sure that smart design and production tools are affordable and available to the whole world, so that we can build the Internet of Production.

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