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 marketplace. This will be achieved through the development of supply chains or ecosystems that will lead to new efficiencies and cost-savings driven by commercial pressures.

In addition, when a stable supply exists, and is subject to market forces which drive down costs and increase performance, further leaps in progress can be catalysed. As an example just look at the spectacular results of industry’s access to a consistent source of consumer electronics subject to exponential improvement, characterised by the well-known Moore’s Law. In just a few decades commercially-driven development has led to $500 smartphones millions of times more powerful than the $3.5 million systems used by NASA during the Apollo missions. It is certainly possible that predictable and cost-effective access to other new technologies could generate similar leaps forward.

But how can this access be enabled in the first place? How do we go about building supply…