Rearchitecting Global Ambition through Technological Integration
John Song
Representative Partner
Suppressed under the ubiquitous threat of COVID-19 virus, the global community is grappling to prevent, detect and cure infections by this merciless invader. The prevailing risk of this virus doesn’t allow any room for exception by location, skin, wealth, age or religion. Certainly, this case will be recorded as one of those most fatal hardships for humanity of disease, earthquake, flood, social confrontation, religious conflict, or war that the whole global community has suffered through. In our societies, we still have shadows of enormous difficulties and hardships that prevailed the whole human community, demonstrating gigantic capacity to swallow the whole societies up.
Rearchitecting Hope, Thought and Action
But humans, together and always, found ways out of them. Someone or some people sparked up brave ambition to win the race against all these with hope for the future, and demonstrated courage and, often, self-sacrifice to survive and prevail again. They all torched strong human will up high and kindled light of hope in the complete darkness of despair and fear. They have been the fundamental source of courage and power to stand up and march to reach the other end of deep dark tunnels. Always, hope for the future has been the ultimate truth of human existence, and still it is and it will be so. Humans are here and now, thanks to the collective hope realized into actions against the wicked problems of history, which spearheaded new pathways of human progress and built bridges over the cliffs of fatality. In this time of grand transition, hope should be torched and lifted high up again to fight against climate crisis and environmental challenges.
The most critical challenge for the whole global community is that climate change and its fellow risks are a much slower and silent killer than all the historical fatalities we experienced, and much more silent and stealthy than COVID-19. It gnaws the edge of human existence with a skillful invisibility and ignorance. Pronouncing this threat through the whole global corners has been the foremost important task, yet, it has not been widely successful until now. Distortions, denials, political manipulations and economic hesitance blocked the flows of clear messages of warnings, cautions, and calls for action. Even with the enthusiastic invaluable effort that have been made by scientists, activists, youths, and awakened leaders, the picture of the world shattered by climate disasters couldn’t have been seen clearly by ordinary eyes. Apparently, it is not an easy task but, nevertheless, this should be done rather soon, since otherwise we will lose a very narrow window to respond to those risks to take actions that are scaled and speedy enough to prevent unavoidable ends within few decades coming. Changing cognition of climate change from ignorance, denial or uncertainty to clear awareness is a fundamental key to nudge nations and peoples onto the track of climate action.
As we observe and hear of impacts of climate and environmental changes through daily news of fires, landslides, floods, droughts, air pollution, heat waves, and subsequent loss of many lives from the whole globe, urgency to rethink, redesign, and reshape global inspiration, strategies, mechanisms and actions is being increased day by day. It is clearly imperative to rearchitect the ways how we think, plan, design and create impact to the world for climate-resilient, sustainable, equitable and inclusive shifts with effects and impacts big enough to alter the trajectory of human advancement toward the better next, not a worse one. Paris agreement has established the critical foundation of global action by each nation with consensual goals of reducing CO2 emission to contain the rise of global temperature under 1.5°C beyond pre-industrialization level and while each and all nations are making their precious effort to achieve nationally determined contributory goals, the most significantly crucial pathway toward mega-impact is through technological advancement. CO2 emission of 29 ~ 32Gt should be further reduced as at 2030, beyond global CO2 reduction targets currently committed through NDCs from all countries(UN EP; Emissions Gap Report 2020, Dec. 2020).
The aim is clear. The timeline is vivid. We have a clear milestone to reach to ensure the trajectory of human advancement surge over the overshadowed cliff of global catastrophes in 10 years’ time frame.
Holistic Integration of Technologies for Mega Impact
But, hope, cognition and rethinking are not enough to achieve the goals. We need practical ways to actualize effective measures needed to change the course of climate and environmental crisis. One of these can be made through holistic integration of technologies.
Recent advancement of technologies over the last three decades especially has been exceptionally brilliant and speedy that we have now capacities that can shorten the distance from imagination to reality much faster and immediate than ever before. Especially the progresses of mobile connectivity of 5G and 6G(xG’s), AI, Blockchains, energy solutions, IoT sensors and their network, business platforms, digital manufacturing, and pharmaceutical and medical technologies are strengthening the belief for the better future and better well-being.
We are in a truly strong position now to design and develop a solution that can create enormous impact and effect to the global community if we ideate, architect, design and integrate all those technologies into a right direction with a right architecture.
Still, we have many more miles that we should go beyond and there are few key road signs that we need to read carefully to make a journey in a right pathway to a right destination. They can be suggested briefly as follows.
Deep Transformation: Societal and economic frameworks should be transformed within the next few decades rapidly to reshape the global communities with the values of climate-resilience, sustainability, equity, inclusiveness and inclusiveness. This requires the whole transformation of societies, throughout all the vertical layers of social systems system and, at the same time, through the whole horizon of all social environment. Transformations, thus, we are pursuing, should not be shallow nor superficial, but deep and fundamental. This will require us to go deep first before we try to go fast. Integration through the horizontal layers of social governance, laws and regulations, policy frameworks, infrastructures, organizations, programs, and people actions, should be seamlessly webbed with integration of the whole horizonal landscape of sectors, industries, businesses, education, environment, cities, and the whole spaces of human activities.
Holistic Architecture: We need an inspirational big design that can evoke significantly big impact to the status quo of current global situation and legacy mechanisms and systems. Designing a big solution architecture at global, national, or at a whole business ecosystem level through holistic integration of compatible solution will render a big opportunity of new innovative business models as well as impactful optimized solutions against climate and environmental crisis. Exploring the effect of convergence, inter-operability and integration of divergent technologies across different sectors and industrial boundaries and discovering opportunities of innovative and more powerful new business models or functional integration is highly needed.
Open Integration: Globally, we observe the cases of disruption and dissolution or disintegration of legacy forms industries, businesses, and value chains. Disintegration of legacy value chains are occurring due to pressure of cost-optimization or intrusion by new innovators. Breaking-down of legacy business value chain happens as business functions are reevaluated in terms of cost-efficiency and effect, and inefficient business functions are shut down or outsourced from partners or business service providers. Some functions may be found profitable out of its own business model, then, they will stand independent alone as niche businesses. Some functions can be absolved by other more efficient service providers or functional mechanisms including business platforms. Some functions, which can’t be justified of their own value, will disappear. Some functions will be reintegrated into another business model of new innovative competitive value. This disintegration-reintegration flow can be illustrated in many cases in industries of banking, automobile, transportation, retail, and many more. At the same time, there are industrial boundary breakers such as Apple Pay, Alibaba, Google, Telus, Amazon, Tencent, Ping An, Ford, GE, and many of open business platforms that can support cross-industrial business services and products. The new industrial or business formation shall be based on sector-less and borderless open integration of businesses through a common value, forming dynamic and divergent economic ecosystems.
Technological integration follows the same pattern. Technologies have potential of disintegration of their own components and opportunity of reintegration with other technologies from somewhere else. Industrial manufacturing technologies, whether legacy or new, can be disintegrated into smaller modules that can be combined and integrated with GHG capture, sequestration and storage technologies, FinTech, AI, Blockchains, and IoT. The architecture and the design of new technological solutions for the next economic paradigm should be pursued with broader open integration of technologies in mind. The desirable new integrative technological solutions are those that can integrate business frames, operational forms, and functional flows in between all horizontal sectoral areas, business models, social and environmental infrastructures and economic cycles and pursue synergetic powerful mega-impact from new integrations.
Penetrative Breakthrough: It is important that the new solution with desirable truly deep impact to the status quo of global situations, should be one that can penetrate into the core nucleus of the target problem, situation or system and hit the center of gravity. Shifting the momentum of inertia to make it move forward to a new movement is not an easy task, but the urgency of our time to solve climate, environmental and economic problems of the time requires us to think intelligently to design penetrative strategies.
Business Ecosystem-oriented: As disintegration of legacy industries and business models accelerate and borders between sectors and traditional industries get thinner and sparse, new forms of business are emerging that are more based on value- and/or-customer centricity rather than legacy business asset or traditional business forms. Traditional industrial classifications can’t frame the new networks of business and new patterns of their functions’ dynamically flexible integration and reintegration. Hence, a new solution to be architected and designed should pick up components across current industrial boundaries and assemble functional components useful for the new network of value-centered business operational scheme. A reference case would be new mobility business ecosystem, where we can observe the disintegration of legacy OEM(Original Equipment Manufacturer) business model of automobiles into EV platform-business, sensors and electronic devices business, driver-experience SW business, autonomous driving solution business, advanced driving SW business, financing, and maintenance businesses, while a new comprehensive business ecosystem of new mobility is being formulated through integration with other businesses such as electric charging network, connected-car infrastructure, mobility-as-a-service business and new innovative service business models.
Regional Integration: maximizing opportunities of regional collaboration and business integration within a region, cultivating local businesses that are connected and interactive together within a region rather than having to have long-range business processes with global business partners, which can provide windows of regional business sustainability and encourage business incubation and acceleration within a region, while reducing impact to environment from global products movement.
National Agility: Nations should be a most important entity of ideation and action for effective implementation of climate-resilient, sustainable, inclusive and equitable transitions. New country- driven action framework as a new model of country- ownership needs to be adopted so that bankability of national investments can be more rigorously pursued, validated and accepted. Focus on holistic national capacity building centered on new solutions is required while international collaboration and reciprocity for knowledge sharing, talent exchange, and experience transfer and business integration should be always encouraged in parallel.
The Framework of Technological Integration
With those guiding road signs as above, let’s look at the whole technology spectrum which can be considered for discovering, architecting, and designing holistic integration for utmost synergetic impact.
Most importantly, new technological integration should be framed with the triune value dimensions; green, digital and sustainable. To solve the wicked problems of old or current economic systems, the future economic paradigm calls for new thought and new principles of climate-resilience, sustainability, inclusiveness, equity, efficiency, smartness, and global connectivity and should serve the whole global community with digital equity and economic fairness.
We should pursue dynamic agile integration of technologies from every sector and every sphere of technological areas to realize holistic integration. Architecting, structuring, and combining all technological components available and useful from the whole technological areas to formulate seamless flows of functions for dynamic and various applications will maximize the whole opportunity of achieving great results of impact.
The following diagram and list of technological areas of each sphere of technologies show the whole framework of consideration and can illustrate which technological components can be sought after within each sphere for holistic technological integration.
Sector & Infrastructure Technology
• Energy: New Energy, Renewables, Transmission, Storage & Distribution, Efficiency, Energy Grids
• Transportation & Mobility
• Industrial Processes, Materials & Facilities
• Agriculture and Farming
• Greenhouse Gas Aversion & Sequestration
• Bio/Health
• Water Management
• Air Quality Management
• Weather Intelligence
• Maritime, Coast and Fisheries
• Forest & Land Use
• Building and Habitation
• Urban Infrastructures
Digital/4IR Technology
• IoT
• Big Data
• AI
• AR/VR
• Blockchains
• Robotics
• Drone
• Autonomous Vehicle
• Cloud
• Mobile Network (xG)
FinTech
• Digital Identity
• Digital Currency
• Financial Platforms
• Digital Financial Instruments
Data & Software
• Software and Apps
• Data Hub
• Digital Integration
• Social Platform
Modularization: Through disintegration of legacy business value chains or effort to make industries and business more agile, flexible, nimble and interoperable, componentization and modularization of business functions and related business structures are accelerating. This goes with standardization of technological components and functional specifications modularization of functional components for dynamic integration and inter- operability at global level in many areas.
Contextualization: Right-fitting technologies into target environment and situations for sustainable operation and maintenance, in deep and realistic consideration of national economic conditions, natural environmental characteristics, technological and scientific capacities, social and cultural memes, human resource readiness, educational capacity and expected actual impacts to societies and business ecosystems is extremely important. As well, combining nature-based solutions with technology- driven engineering solutions can provide cost- efficiency and extended benefits to the societies than mere technology-driven and construction- driven approach.
Electrification: Converting energy sources required for the operation of technologies from carbon-energy to renewable electronic energy in every sector and area is a common trend. Especially, electrification of vehicles, airplanes, industrial processes, cooking, and heating through renewable green energy sources is making global progress.
Regionalization: Enabling and extending intra- regional ecosystem of technologies and related businesses and integrating business opportunities within a region is an important aspect of changing the pattern of globalization. With the capacity for general commodity-style technologies widely spreading over the globe universally, need for across-region trades and transactions is diminishing rapidly, while more knowledge-and-technology intensive industries and businesses shall take more time to be regionalized. There are huge opportunities, though, of expediting regionalization of all industrial sectors and businesses through international business partnership and reciprocal collaboration for sharing and transferring knowledge and technologies across regions.
Ecosystemization: As borders and boundaries of industries get thinner and sparse, creating organic value stream across business sectors, business models, consumer needs, and products and services, happens organically globally. Value-centered dynamic variation and swift reshaping of integrative business networks is expected to increase rapidly. Equitable and organic continuation of interoperability, utilization and expansion of optimized technologies and people-experience of such new ecosystems will be key factors in accelerating this trend.
Platformization: Business platforms of divergent characteristics and functions enable and sustain integration and interactions between businesses and societies. Platforms have variant styles, either of dominant vertical monopoly or of more open horizontal marketspace, enabling continuous value sharing and exchange of customer needs, products, services and finance. It is highly desirable to establish open digital platform that can provide and maintain open space for more dynamic exchange of businesses, innovative opportunities, and technological components for efficient deployment and realization of actions required for climate- resilient, sustainable and equitable economic advancement, contributing significantly to the creation of resonating actions and results in the fight against climate and environmental risks.
A Big Call
Integration is not an easy task. It is even more difficult when we need to open every box to look into and understand every constituent of a problem, especially when the problem itself is such big as climate change or economic disparity. But often, we find that, without a breakthrough that destructs old legacy integration, and reintegrate it, we can’t solve the problem. Now is the time to inspire ourselves with this cognition and find out the best way to create a significantly big momentum to move the whole global community to the next step. The moment is now, through holistic technological integration approach, for us to rearchitect our ambition, re-design technological solutions and re- activate our action at national level as well as at global level through harmonized effort. The call is made here and now.
