Deeptech masterclass - Help strategists to understand innovation at the convergence of technologies

Between 2010 and 2020, we have seen the emergence of key enabling technologies coming to maturity. Among other we see emerging B.E.N.C.H. domains for instance:

• Biotechnologies: Gene editing / Synthetic biology

• Electronics: Material / Photonics / Additive manufacturing

• Nanotechnologies: Building blocks chemistry / Analytics

• Computation: Artificial intelligence / Quantum computing

in complement of classic disciplines

• Humanities: Smart City Society / Environment acting citizen

Illustration: Doraemon Robot Cat from future amazing technology gadgets Web-Japan

2020 years of science and engineering acceleration

The years 2000 was the raise of digital champions who conducted from 2010, a decade of massive digital transformation with social networking, e-commerce, conversion of customer data for business. Many companies lacking behind have invested huge amount of resource to keep-up, while digital giants have grown massively in the last 10 years becoming the world most profitable companies.

The 2020 decade will see a bigger challenge with a race for science and engineering to secure core technologies for massive business transformation of our society. Elon Musk after selling paypal in 2002 shares realized that it was maybe to late for starting a new digital venture and quite early for deeptech. Today in 2020 you see how Elon Musk has secure the deeptech with SpaceX, Bore, Hyperloop, Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink, SolarCity. Same with Jeff Bezos and Amazon after the AWS spin-off, Amazon Robotics (Kiva Systems) and the investment in Blue Origin. Those two consortium of companies show; how much in the future, science and engineering breakthrough technologies will transform the economy and society.

How to get the industry ready for deeptech?

While many industry players have excellent science and technology fundamentals, they are lacking the strategic big picture. The race for technology mastery has already started and the winners will be those capable of converging technologies from different domains for instance AI/Quantum/Gene editing to create new medicine, superfood or data storage, same with AI/Nanotechnologies/Additive Manufacturing to create next generation aeronautics or energy capture... This will become a major concern for defining the key strategic focus for large corporations. For that, companies can't rely on their scientist and engineers and need their colleagues with finance, economic, sociology and political science background to understand key technologies, their convergence and the impact on each every industry.

Start with a Masterclass

We believe that more and more academic programs will start training non scientist student to manage deeptech with emergence of Masters in Deeptech Management.

For the professional already in the industry and not taking a year off to go back to the university, we are considering offering a Masterclass program. We would consider a 5 consecutive days program dedicated for non-scientist participants, financed by the companies. The first 3 days would be dedicated to screen 4 enabling technologies with use cases on potential convergences. The remaining two days would be dedicated to corporate innovation management principles and writing, under supervision of our experts, a 4-5 pages strategic whitepaper on how participant's company will be impacted by technology convergence and some recommendation to prepare for it.

We see this Masterclass program as an excellent complement to Master in Deeptech Management for driving adoption of science and engineering topic by company employees having general economy, finance and business background and possibly avoid to exclude them from the coming major technology transformations.