In order to gain competitive advantage companies must relentlessly improve their value creation processes and define the "right value". A random selection of my thoughts to this end is enlisted below.
Innovation project roadmap - a business value optimization problem
Human APIs - organizing loosely coupled teams into a tightly aligned unit
In order to create the "right value" and "create it right" companies must keep abreast of technological innovations. A random selection of the topics that keep me engaged is enlisted below.
Master thesis of Konstantin Seitz (co-supervised by me) - Scalability of Hyperledger Fabric
Connected mobility - Interconnecting pedestrians, bicycle and scooter drivers with cars
Telco Edge Cloud - GSMA Future Networks
Digital currencies - An overview of Bitcoin
Post-quantum cryptography is a very important topic that almost all industries must pay attention to now. Roughly speaking, most businesses rely on some form of public-key cryptography in many of their business critical use cases. The security of such a system relies on the assumption that certain mathematical problems like prime number factorization are "computationally hard". This assumption would not be valid if quantum computers are developed, e.g., Peter Shor has invented a quantum algorithm that would lead to an "efficient solution" to the prime number factorization problem. Since the development of a quantum computer seems realistic now, the cryptographic community must start developing post-quantum cryptographic systems. Such systems must rely on mathematical problems that would be "computationally hard" even for quantum computers. Lattice based problems combined with learning with errors seem to be one of the leading candidates according to the NIST Post Quantum Cryptography competition. It is expected that within a few years this competition would lead to an adoption of some of these protocols as post-quantum cryptographic systems. Patents pose an obstacle to the widespread industrial adoption of these protocols. Daniel J. Bernstein has published a patent analysis which is a great community service.
There are real societal benefits if we get the following sorted out:
Free and open source software development is a true testament to boundaryless human collaboration. As a business user I found the following free online resources quite helpful:
OpenStack - cloud computing infrastructure
OpenShift - cloud computing platform
OpenAI - artificial intelligence resources
Allen Institute for AI - artificial intelligence resources
MLflow - platform for managing the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle (well-suited for individual developers)
DS4PS - data science for the public sector (emphasis on R)
Node-red - low-code tool for IoT applications
ProM - an open source process mining framework
Silq - intuitive language for quantum computingÂ
Julia - a high performance programming language for scientific computing tasks
SAFe - a framework for scaling lean and agile practices