Technological Innovation Vs. Digital Disruption

Technology has the power to reshape in turn the society that shapes it.

As the world shifts to greater adoption of digital technology in our everyday lives, innovation is absolutely crucial for any business.

I had a very interesting discussion with Pedro Pinto, Chief Technology Office at InnoWave Technologies. The detailed version of the conversation is given below. 

Every week we publish insights with a Q&A with CIOs, CTOs CMOs, CXOs and Head of Departments.

See the link to the previous LinkedIn Q&As by Indus Net Technologies at the bottom of this post.

Q1. How do you define innovation in this ever-changing world of “digital”?

Pedro:

Innovation is when science meets art, the most accurate way of creating new things to change lives and create a better world

Q2. Yubuy?is an innovative interactive TV commerce solution. What kind of technology is used for this product and what is it’s key benefits?

Pedro: It’s all about user experience, imagine you are in your couch and ready to see a football match that is starting and with two or three clicks you order a pizza, easy, simple and fast. Yubuy? manages a multiple store platform allowing users to buy products and services on a family environment. It is a solution that provides audiences with a personalized shopping experience from the comfort of their own home via a simple, convenient and secure solution running in every household.

Q3. Personalisation is a must for audiences now. Does Yubuy?plan to make its digital solution personalised and deliver customised user experience to buyers?

Pedro: It’s already personalised, we present specific options based not only on historical interaction but also based on the shows that the user is watching, based on where he lives and what he prefers.

Q4. Ubiquitous connectivity, AI, distributed computing and blockchain help cities transform their data into actionable intelligence. How is Thought Creator helping Smart Cities/Homes, Transportation and M2M markets with its solutions?

Pedro: Thought Creator is creating innovative solutions for smart cities and smart homes based on a simple but powerful concept, the need to create solutions that, in the end, need to target smart people, it’s all about taking advantage on the smart edge and the smart cloud to create solutions that will empower citizens to experience more the city and the house where they live creating in the process a more sustainable place.

Q5. GoSupply is focused on providing Advanced Supplier Risk Assessment and Monitoring services. What are the technologies that are being leveraged here to make the process of procurement and compliance better and simplify decision making for organsiers?

Pedro: GoSupply is an innovative approach for a platform that delivers the capability to know (in this case in real time) how suppliers can impact the business of our clients. Using robot process automation, machine learning, data crawling, chatbots and gamification, GoSupply is delivering the most evolved solution in the market for risk and compliance assessment leveraging the information that is available in the cloud and creating smarter ways to collect information from suppliers.

Q6. What have been your key digital initiatives as the CTO of Innowave? Is there any particular initiative you are very proud of? What makes it so special?

Pedro: As CTO at InnoWave I’m the enabler for innovation, spreading the vision that we as individuals and as a company need to focus on create a better world and the innovation is the better and fastest way to do it. My team is experimenting every day new ways to create, new technologies to build and new ways to interact in order to achieve this vision. In the end it’s not about technology can do, but what we are doing with it and let me share with you the most important secret that is behind this innovation spirit, when we change people’s lives, we change our own.

Q7. What do you think is the most hyped up “digital technology” which may not deliver much compared to the hype that has been built around it through media and marketing?

Pedro: Probably, at least in the near future, the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality hype, the use cases are good but the need of a specific hardware to use it can be a showstopper for a massive implementation of it. But in the end you’ll never know it, 30 years ago, only a very small number of people believed in the concept of a computer in every home.

Q8. Industry 4.0, or the fourth industrial revolution, is characterized by new technologies that blur the lines between physical and digital worlds—driving real-time access to new and existing data sources. Paired with powerful analytics tools, such as visualization, scenario analysis, and predictive learning algorithms, this access to data is fundamentally changing how companies operate. What are the technologies you see changing the entire game in the near future?

Pedro: Without any doubt, A.I – Artificial Intelligence, is the game changer in all the technologies that can and are being implemented. AI is solving the big challenges created by IoT, by M2M, with the world becoming digital that is how to handle the volume of data that is being generated and how to generate information, knowledge and wisdom from it. As technicians and as humans we need to take care of the ethical and security challenges related with the power that we are giving to machines to decide and to learn, (as we did in the past with the power to create fire, the power to produce energy and so many other humankind disruptions). The ability to handle with this challenge will decide if we will be in the future the most powerful species on the Earth or not (or if we will still live on it).

Q9. How do you keep yourself on track with so much distraction, noise and fast pace of technology change? Do you have any guiding principle that keeps you grounded while you steer one of the most important functions in a modern enterprise?

Pedro: I’m using A.I. to score, cluster and to identify the most interesting and important technology changes that I need to track. The most important principle that I use on this is that I don’t know what I don’t know until I know it, imagine that you are on the sea, and you want to take the perfect wave, you need to be aware, you need to be prepared, you need also to be prepared to take the wrong wave and after that be as soon as possible ready to take another one, and then, if you see the perfect wave, ride it with all your strengths and capabilities.

Q10. How do you suggest, any CIO/CTO or business leader can achieve Digital Success?

Pedro:

Innovation, innovation and innovation. Start from the concept, a concept that will somehow change people’s lives, build the experience making it easy, simple and with fast adoption, use powerful technologies to empower the solution and grant that, at each step you will always innovate and improve something. 

I profusely thank Pedro, for his time and the wonderful insights he shared.

Read the past LinkedIn Q&A's below:

• With Tracy Willis, Chief Information Officer & Director, Information Technology Services of University of the West of England
• With Fernando Vegas. Fernando is the Former CIO of OHL
• With Edmund Dilger, Founder & CEO of Policy Castle and David Stubbs Founder & Director of RightIndem
• With Akash Tyagi, Head of Strategy - OTT & Digital, Dish TV
• With Dennis Gr?nger, InsurTech Professional, Author and Speaker at NextTo InsurTech
• With Arun Gupta, Chief Technology Officer, Praxis Home Retail Limited
• With Anil Kumar Singh, Director and CIO of DiGi-Agro Consulting and ex-CIO of Krishak Bharati Co-Operative Limited
• With Ranjit Satyanath, CIO of Infiniti Retail Ltd. (Croma)
• With Priya Dar, CIO, and Head of Digital Practice, Godfrey Phillips India Ltd.

At Indus Net Technologies we are creating #DigitalSuccess for global customers. We are always ready to hear from leaders on their plans to create #DigitalSuccess.

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