ASM Fellows’ Lecture: Industry 4.0 Ecosystem: Leap-frogging Strategies in a Hyper-converged Global Economy

ASM Fellows’ Lecture
Industry 4.0 Ecosystem: Leap-frogging Strategies in a Hyper-converged Global Economy
By Professor Dr Mahendhiran Sanggaran Nair FASc

Globalisation has brought about various opportunities and challenges. The emergence of virtual worlds, converging technologies, new economic superpowers and rapid technology diffusion among others are traits of a globalised world.

Converging technology platforms has created a significant transformation regarding the way we produce products thanks to the digitization of manufacturing; bitcoin, crowdfunding, big data and cognitive computing are some of the keywords that are actively used in today’s hyper-converged global economy.

As the world economy moves forward with the next iteration of industrial revolution, so did its drivers; what started off as a production economy, with land, labour and capital as its drivers, slowly evolved into a knowledge-based economy, which utilised information, ideas and innovation.

The world economy further evolved into a hyper-converged one, being a diffusion and utilisation of smart systems and algorithms that generate new information, ideas and innovation that is fuelled by data and machine learning.

Professor Mahendhiran Sanggaran Nair FASc presented his Fellows’ Lecture titled Industry 4.0 Ecosystem: Leap-frogging Strategies in a Hyper-converged Global Economy on 29 November 2018.

To illustrate how technology could improve on existing economies, Professor Mahendhiran used a beef and leather supply chain as an example.

In the supply chain, Professor Mahendhiran presented a collaborative smart manufacturing system. Sensor technology, 3D printing, and an improved Logistics 4.0 system were combined with cyber security, cloud computing and big data analytics to bring massive improvements and efficiency, from production to marketing.

Furthermore, Professor Mahendhiran showed the current state of implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), taking note that smaller firms are adopting it faster than larger firms. He also presented the key challenges faced by firms in implementing I4.0 from various perspectives, such as by firm sizes and by sector.

Professor Mahendhiran showed that there was a high correlation between technology environment index (TEI) and Economic Wealth; 63% of the variation in wealth is explained by variation in the technology environment.

A robust technology ecosystem equipped with capital investment, talent investment and the ten pillars of network readiness, combined with dynamic innovative, adaptive and absorptive capabilities would yield significant socio-economic impact.

Professor Mahendhiran then showed several forecasts for Malaysia’s GDP by sector, showing the projected level of improvements at various levels from a low growth to the projected growth at a leap-frogging pace.

Professor Mahendhiran foresighted the GDP of several major countries from 2018 to 2047, using an ecosystem-based endogenous growth model called MyGEM (Malaysia’s Generalised Endogenous Model) developed by him and his team from Monash Malaysia. The trajectories projected that a sound development of the technology ecosystem will create wealth of all sectors and the economy.

Click here to learn more about Professor Mahendhiran’s presentation.