Design for Future Technologies, New Thinking Required

[Arthur Hanson]

Just like all technologies benefiting from the "Great Acceleration", battery technology is advancing on several fronts with several technologies and more to come. This technology advances the holding capacity for electrons at the anode and the first generation promises an improvement of 15 to 20% with the potential of a 40% improvement. This and several other battery technologies promise not only improved performance in capacity, but charging time and cost. This will open up entirely new uses for battery powered devices of all types. With the great number of battery research projects increasing every year, it's a safe bet for designers to take this into account and design devices to take advantage of this on a parallel path instead a serial one. The changes from the acceleration of all technologies require entirely new thinking when developing technologies if you want to win the race. This is but one of hundreds of examples of accelerating technologies that will require a whole different mind set and contain different risk factors when starting a project. All areas of endeavor are advancing at an ever accelerating clip and many once in a while even experience a dramatic breakthrough that changes the entire game in a single stroke. Designing anything including business plans now requires a deeper and broader vision than ever before. This will create demand for a new type of business/technology strategist/company that doesn't exist today. Properly handled, a product development structure will plan on using multiple technologies not currently available but that meet at the same time on a parallel time line. It will be higher risk, but higher reward. This will create a whole host of new business models in the tech industry. The coming of robotic research will only accelerate the current "Great Acceleration". More than any other sector, the semi/nanotech sector has to take this into account. One of the most dangerous factors is a competing technology comes out of left field and renders your technology worthless or outdated before it can even pay for it's development cost and sometimes before it even comes to market. I invested in one advanced technology only to have another technology come out that rendered it almost worthless and lost most of my investment and many went bankrupt.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...nce-could-make-electric-vehicles-far-cheaper/

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