"Capture and Control" the Data

What are “smart” and “connected” products? “Smart” means they have sensors to measure things, software to analyze that data, and memory to store the data. And “connected” means it has ports, and wireless communication capabilities.

 

Earlier, the software logic to interpret the data and spot patterns in it was written by humans. But increasingly, it’s done by “machine learning” algorithms – the machine “learns” on its own by looking at huge data sets. Now, with 5G, we may be on the cusp of the next wave of changes. As communication speeds increase, it will become cheap and practical to collate multiple data sources (say tractor data with other farm equipment data with weather data) to produce previously unimaginable insights. There’s a lot of money in such intelligence.

 

In The Great Tech Game, Anirudh Suri says that in such a world, data is king:

“Will the next retail innovation likely come from those professionals who have the data to identify new opportunities, or from those who don’t?”

It will inevitably create a world split into data providers and data crunchers:

“The others risk becoming mere providers of raw data to those digital platforms while having to pay for the digital intelligence produced with those data by the platform owners.”

 

Today, most of the top data platform companies are American (Google, Facebook, Amazon) or Chinese (Alibaba, TenCent). Is there no hope for the rest of the world then? Has the race already been lost? Not necessarily, says Suri.

“Countries must therefore develop clear strategies and build capabilities to enhance their ability to capture and control data, and then use the data to make more intelligent production.”

 

As mentioned above, digital intelligence requires large data sets. A country with a smaller population, by definition, cannot produce too much data. India, he says, doesn’t have the Big Data companies yet. But it can and should take measures to “capture and control data”, set laws on who owns the data – India or the foreign companies, insist on data being shared with Indian companies, or forbid the data from being taken out of the country. Take advantage of the huge market size of India, he says – most companies be forced agree to India’s terms.

 

On this front, Europe is at a disadvantage, he feels. While they are a big provider of data, they are not a single political entity. And that creates a problem – if the EU tries to “capture and control data”, unlike India, it isn’t clear who would be allowed to use that data – one can’t imagine French, British and German governments agreeing on which of them gets the data. And if they can only get their own country data, well, it would be too small a data set…

 

Suri feels countries that don’t frame the right policies on data matters will almost certainly get left behind, the way the Industrial Revolution left Asia far behind.