Minds of their own

One of my regular columns focused this month on the issue of “hyperconnectivity.”

Quite simply, we’re entering an era in which almost everything is becoming plugged into everything else. For example, consider what is happening in the world of sports:

“I recently spoke to a group of CEOs of some of the world’s largest sporting goods manufacturers and challenged them to think 20 years down the road. I suggested they imagine a baseball bat — would it still be a simple, shaped piece of wood? 

The bat of the future, I suggested, would have intelligence and connectivity embedded into it. The young uber-wired kids of 2025 could use that technology to analyze their swing. A backyard virtual sensor net could even feed the details to a virtual catcher 20 miles away, allowing them to carry on a dynamic, if somewhat impersonal, game of virtual baseball.

Far-fetched? Not at all. Scary? Definitely. The trend toward such embedded intelligence is extremely real. And, as I said to the CEOs, the future “isn’t bad, it’s just different.”

As this future unfolds, there will be tremendous opportunities for innovation: from the development of new products and services, through the redefinition of existing models, as well as innovative strategies to avoid market commoditization. If you want one trend to watch for the next twenty years, this is probably the one.

You should even consider what is happening with intelligent highway cones. …… which I also cover in the article….

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