One of the many wonderful speakers at Geonext 2012 was Dr James Bradfield Moody, whom opened the conference with a presentation, entitled: The Next Wave of Innovation: Convergence of Digital and Natural.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the tide of progress has ebbed and flowed: five distinct waves, each starting with disruptive new technologies and ending with a global depression, have transformed our industries, societies and economies almost beyond recognition. We are now on the cusp of another massive transformation – the sixth wave of innovation.
The sixth wave will see the shift from society’s consumption of abundant resources, to management of scarce resources, and the drive to manage them more efficiently. According to James, we need to decouple resources from economic growth, much like, decades ago, we decoupled labour from economic growth.
Another fundamental change to economic structures will come in the form of a shift from reliance on products, to a reliance on services.
With the growing presence of digital devices, just about every object will have a digital counterpart that has a spatial element. In the drive to become ever more resource efficient, the location of objects – wether that be staff, trucks, or other resources – will be key.
Additionally, the new wave of services will all have spatial elements – from customer data, to asset location, to distributed networks. Geo-information will be critical in this next wave of information.
Dr James Bradfield Moody based his talk on the book he co-wrote with Bianca Nogrady, entitled The Sixth Wave.
The Sixth Wave is available through Random House Australia, and is available at all good book stores. For more information visit http://sixthwave.org/.
