Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: How To Accelerate Innovation In The Trading And Logistics Industries

Innovation Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: How To Accelerate Innovation In The Trading And Logistics Industries Ami Daniel Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jul 18, 2022, 07:15am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Co-founder and CEO of Windward (Lon: WNWD), AI entrepreneur.

getty These are the golden days of the maritime ecosystem. Think about it for a second. A decade ago, we couldn’t even pick up where a vessel was on the open sea.

Now we are seeing the emergence of a real maritime technology market. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Sir Isaac Newton in a letter he wrote to fellow English scientist Robert Hooke. Indeed, it coins a concept: Innovation and further inventions don’t need to start from scratch if we find a way to create a continuity of knowledge and information between key stakeholders.

One of the biggest challenges in any industry is productization: how to provide concrete value or fulfill a workflow from data and AI to customers. In shipping, there are so many trades (e. g.

, wet bulk versus dry bulk, tramp shipping versus liner shipping), ship types (e. g. , Panamax versus Aframax) and processes (e.

g. , pre-fixture versus post-fixture) that it always seems like there’s more innovation and value to provide customers with. In addition, many traders, shipping companies and really any organization with room to scale likes building their own IT platform.

Every company has its secret sauce and its own knowledge and know-how that it wouldn’t want to share with others. We are also seeing companies showing others the true value of digitalization. We believe this is driving aspirations for more traditional freight forwarders, shippers and other stakeholders hoping to think faster and go further.

However, according to Thetius research, digitalization in shipping is only taking its first steps. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event If we were to take a look and review this development in the container shipping world, we would see a plethora of applications and platforms being built, from booking platforms to visibility platforms and marketplaces. In this space, there are local platforms, international platforms and integrated platforms.

We have been fortunate enough to be able to build a number of very valuable products—really moving the needle for thousands of users. Having worked on so many products in this space, there are some common themes that I’ll highlight in this article that all organizations working in this and other industries can learn from and apply to their own products. Back to basics Over the last several months, we have seen so much opportunity for the acceleration of innovation in our ecosystem.

We believe this will allow companies to move from building on top of legacy data, thus accelerating innovation, reducing time to value and increasing value for customers and end users. Here are some things to consider when building a solution, either internal or external. 1.

User Persona: Who is the user persona you are building the solution for? 2. Pain: What’s the main pain and value proposition? 3. Flow: What are the key workflows you will need to support? 4.

Insights: What are the data streams and insights that are required to provide a value add for the user? Specifically, how can these insights be integrated into the workflow? 5. Focus: What must we build ourselves versus partner with others? Many CEOs and companies have been reviewing their focus, operating plans and budgets due to the situation in capital markets. Startups that raised Round A or B funding face a significant chasm when wanting to raise more.

Companies that are building internal applications need to be much more focused and complete an analysis of build versus partner versus buy now more than ever. BMW As A Test Case In the process of building one BMW car, a manufacturer may make use of 10,000 SKUs (stock keeping units). Most of them are manufactured by third parties.

In the world of software, it’s pretty much the same: We all use databases (e. g. , MongoDB), infrastructure (e.

g. , GraphQL) and open libraries to accelerate AI development. However, in terms of the data—the insights—that power our machines, at least in the broader maritime and supply chain worlds, we are still very much constrained to simple track-and-trace or shipping movement data.

Maybe applying the same approach could be useful in accelerating innovation here. Instead of redoing all insights from scratch, could we build on the innovation of others, use insight-as-a-service and focus our efforts on our must-haves? With everything that is going on in the capital market, it seems like narrowing our focus and increasing our quality is a must. Collaboration and focus aren’t opposites of each other; they are necessary complementary elements.

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