Mika's See Beyond Show - On Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Mika Tienhaara's See Beyond Show
S1E9 / Fighting for minerals and advanced manufacturing - what's a winning strategy? With Goran Roos.
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S1E9 / Fighting for minerals and advanced manufacturing - what's a winning strategy? With Goran Roos.

The new "Modern Times" means sophisticated automation and a huge amount of new job opportunities.

Guest: Professor Göran Roos, a Swedish academic, technologist, author and businessman. He is a specialist in the field of intellectual capital and an expert in innovation management and strategy1. (wikipedia)

Pandemics come and go. We are still in a pandemic, but hopefully coming out of this pandemic soon, we have an altered society and world. Apart from being a very bad, difficult and devastating COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dramatic change ongoing in how we interact using digital and online resources - with virtual meetings (like this podcast as an example), online shopping, deliveries and streaming. All this is now part of the new normal.

But also as supplies drawing from international sources have been difficult and partly impossible impacting the sovereignty, the national strategies are incorporating more of manufacturing of critical equipment to have secure supply sources.

The supply chain disruptions have also impacted large corporates. That is also reshaping their strategies, having a deeper direct control of even the raw materials.

We have to go green and that means for mobility and transportation we are going electric. This is not the only impact, but materials, such as steel, will in the future be produced with carbon neutral processes. That in turn means that there is a need for green hydrogen - en mass2. For this transition taking place, there is an enormous need for electricity.

According to prof. Roos the world is shifting from a dependency of petrol (OPEC) to a dependency of metals (China).

The semiconductor supply shortage recently is showing also how this is a critical and strategic product. Semiconductor development and production is an extremely high risk venture every time. The winners will be those with unique and required tools, machine and process knowledge.

All in all, there are great opportunities for science, technology and manufacturing.

Don’t stay in a dying business, for instance in automotive business, you need to shift to a strategy and product architecture with batteries/electrical motors and away from internal combustion engines3. A lot less components, meaning also that this will be a challenge for the supplier companies.

Modern Times. We are now in another shift with great job opportunities.

Above picture is from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times4, by coincidence I watched it recently. We are up for a new big transformation which also creates a vast amount of opportunities.

There will be fights over the scarcity of talents, and in Europe, there is the dilemma -EU has about 1 million unfilled IT positions presently. The Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence is not stopping; automation will continue to grow in sophistication, at the same time, there will be a huge amount of new jobs created.

Speed is critical. You need to be agile. Not just as an individual or company. It applies also for the nation and the administration.

Discussion between journalist and union representative:

Journalist: "Are you not afraid of jobs disappearing with new technology?

Union rep: “We are not afraid of new technology, but of old technology. Companies with old technology go under.”

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For Prof. Roos the technology shifts in the sectors of agriculture and aquaculture are behind but the potential is enormous and we can expect some deeper insights from these areas from him in the times coming.

NOTE: For a discussion on technology readiness, TRLs and MRL5s, you may listen to the See Beyond episode with John Saiz, S1E5: https://mikatienhaara.substack.com/p/s1e5-sometimes-its-ok-to-fail-from?r=foifx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy

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1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ran_Roos

2

More about hydrogen and steel in my “Joules of the Week #2”, see my energy for the future channel: https://energymika.substack.com/

3

The death of the ICE Age I have commented in some other articles and there is more upcoming

4

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)

5

TRL - Technology Readiness Level, MRL - corresponding Manufacturing Readiness Level

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