Sustainability, IoT & Blockchain

What IoT and Blockchain can do for the United Nations 2030 Agenda for sustainable developments.

Read the full article on Medium

On May 8th I did a speech about IoT, Blockchain, and Sustainability, at the Green Tech Innovation event organized by EU Business School and Naked Innovation, photo credits Greta Gridinaite

The interest in IoT started growing when I realized that blockchain technology will be the catalyst for IoT adoption and that the combination of IoT, blockchain, and supply chain, will greatly foster future sustainable developments in line with the United Nations 2030 Agenda for sustainable developments.

About

This is the transcription of part of my speech at the Green Tech Innovation event about IoT, Blockchain, and Sustainability.

1. United Nations 2030 Agenda for sustainable development
2. Why Sustainability (IoT + Blockchain+ Supply Chain)?
3. Main use cases
4. IoT, Blockchain, and Sustainability challenges
5. My thoughts about Blockchain & Sustainability

Read the full article on Medium

2. Why Sustainability (IoT + Blockchain+ Supply Chain)?

Why is IoT in 3rd place in the McKinsey’s research, between the disruptive technologies with more economic impact?

a) Simply, because IoT connects things that before were unconnected!

What are these things?

· individuals (human beings)

· collectives (homes, organizations, companies, etc.)

· to things like physical and digital objects

b) The estimation of the number of connected devices in 2020 is around 30 billion and the numbers will be growing to 75 billion in 2025

c) IoT has been applied to supply chain since the twentieth century, to track products using RFID Radio-Frequency Identification and GPS sensors.

d) the ”invisible” technology that will allow IoT adoption, is blockchain; which is the backbone of the modern supply chain.

New RFID uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. The tags contain electronically stored information, gaining data like the temperature at which an item was stored, how long it spent in transit, quality control, on-time deliveries, and product forecasting.

2.2 Advantages of IoT, DLT and supply chain

Simply put, the implication of the advantages below reflects on a great number of use cases applicable to cross-industry.

• Real-time monitoring track and trace

Increase accuracy and speed, scale, leading improvements in the chain. Manufacturing, logistics, storage: optimize, batching, routing, delivery of goods.

• Inventory management

-no buffer stock by providing visibility of inventory and shipments

-reducing bank fees for letters of credit

-urgent orders can be expedited or rerouted

-better service to consumers

4. IoT, Blockchain and Sustainability challenges

Although the powerful combination of those technologies will leverage all the use case already listed and many more, in terms of production deployment and adoption, there are still lots of challenges to face.

1. Budget allocation is a common challenge for sustainability and development of new technologies like IoT and blockchain. Mostly comes from the limited budget allocated under the label “innovation and digital projects”.

• Sustainability has a cost that sometimes doesn’t find a justification.
• Implementing new technology has a cost of the risk to step in a new and unknown field.
• Allocating a budget for sustainability should be seen as an investment that brings commercial value. Companies that do not see the value long term today, will be forced tomorrow,(if survived), by competitors eating their market segment. Likewise, if a company doesn’t find a way to navigate through new technologies, or generally speaking innovation, the “long term” won’t exist.

2. Development Stage & Massive Adoption: IoT and Blockchain are two technologies at its infancy that still have a lot of challenges to overcome.

· IoT challenges:

o Mobility: authenticate ourselves, get authorization and access controls to the corresponding device services

o Interoperability: diversity and heterogeneity lead to interoperability problems, different manufacturers, vendors, communities and standard groups

o Scalability & Trust: in trustless networks, how to build mutual trust relationships between different systems

o Privacy & Security: security and privacy concerns to be taken into account as a consequence of the above properties of the technology

· Blockchain challenges (check my article: How to approach a blockchain Pilot and challenges):