Building Supply Chains and Ecosystems for Innovative Technologies

How do you build a supply chain for a brand new technology?

Cutting-edge innovation today is often characterised by technologies with the potential to affect many fields, to greater or lesser extents, simultaneously as they begin to mature. Artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), graphene, virtual reality (VR), robotics, quantum computing and nanotech are just some of the examples of innovations which are touted, with varying degrees of pessimism or hype depending on the source, as being able to change virtually every aspect of our lives.

The changes discussed are often described as wholesale ‘disruption’ or ‘revolution’, concepts that will always grab the most headlines, though it will likely be more incremental in many fields. And this iterative progress won’t take place in a vacuum; as different innovations develop they will also be deployed in combination (we’re already seeing how important some level of AI technology is to the success of IoT networks for example) spawning yet more new ideas, capabilities, products and businesses.

Realising the enormous potential of the cutting-edge technologies creeping closer to the mainstream requires a robust, stable and scalable supply of their fundamental units in the…