REAP Conference 2015 Converging Technologies
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Converging Technologies for Agriculture, considering the position of Electronics and Software Design Services in the AgriTech sector. My presentation at the Agri-Tech East REAP 2015 Conference at Churchill College, Cambridge
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REAP Conference 2015 Converging Technologies
- 1. 1 REAP Conference 2015 Converging Technologies for Agriculture Clifford Dive 11 November 2015
- 2. 2 What is my pitch….
- 3. 3 What is my pitch…. I bring ignorance to the table YOU’RE FIRED!!!
- 4. 4 What is my pitch…. I bring transferable knowledge and specialist skills to the table YOU’RE GREAT!!!
- 5. 5 Strategy Document Global Opportunities Technology revolution ...Breakthroughs in satellite imagery and remote sensing, soil and water monitoring and precision farming are reducing the energy and environmental footprint of modern farming.
- 6. 6 Transferable skills • Sensors • Communications • Wireless • Internet of Things • Big data • Imagery • Analytics
- 9. 9 Fresh ideas or ignorance? Specialist technical consultancies can bring a fresh approach, transferable knowledge and specialist skills to agri-tech… …discuss “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein
- 10. 10 How can we help? cliff.dive@argondesign.com +44 1223 422355 www.argondesign.com twitter.com/Argon_Design linkedin.com/company/argon-design-ltd “Thinking inside the box”
Editor's Notes
- What’s my pitch? When I told my boss my theme for this presentation, he didn’t think it was a good idea – so, because of the sort of person I am, that reinforced my resolve to do it anyway. A few years ago one of the contestants on the Apprentice came up with a novel approach – he told the truth….
- …and if my boss learns that I used this analogy he might have the same response. ...but I think this statement was more intelligent than the contestant or Sir Alan recognised I’ve spent a lot of my life working in electronic and software product design services. To translate that into English, if someone needs electronics and software as part of a product, they come to us, pay us some money, we help them to create and develop their product, and then they get rich selling their wonderful product and live happily ever after. Our customers come from a range of backgrounds – for us they range from startups and some bigger companies, in markets such as telecomms, medical technology, financial services, even domestic lighting and fashion clothing retail…. … a whole bunch of stuff in which we’re not expert – especially fashion, as you can see. On the other hand our customers are not experts in leading edge electronics. Working with our customers as a team, together we produce some fantastic results. …and in doing that we develop a range of transferable skills. What we learnt about demanding performance for financial services trading systems can be applied to analytical machines for life sciences. The machine learning process we developed for facial feature recognition could be used in imagery analysis to determine how well your crops are growing. So let’s replay that line
- …and could get a better outcome. Just last week we were doing a sales presentation to a company that builds machinery used in agricultural packaging. I expect some of you will know them well. The people we were talking to have worked for many years in that company. The company is in a world-dominant position. Those guys are genuinely true experts in their field … …but when we presented our proposed approach to their new development, replacing features that have survived the test of time over 15 years, we were able to come up with ideas that they had not thought of – fresh ideas that they liked, and ideas that spawned other ideas. Those ideas would not have happened without them – and would not have happened without us. It’s what teams are about.
- After I joined Argon Design I looked at possible markets for our services. We focus more on technical skills than market sectors, so we were looking for markets that had potential development opportunities in technical areas to which we could contribute. Agritech looked interesting and I found the Government’s strategy document of 2013. This talks about the drivers of increasing demand and population, and also talks about the opportunities for the application of technology. Interestingly I could find no mention of electronics or the internet… …but there are 25 mentions of data …and the good news is that it talks about the need for innovation, and makes the essential business case. As I investigated further it appeared to me that the agritech business is quite polarised – there are some very big players, mostly headquartered outside the UK, and a number of small innovatory UK companies. So what opportunities do I see for technical consultancies like ours to contribute?
- Here’s a list of contenders – most but not all of them are appropriate for Argon Design, but they are all areas where technical specialists from outside the Agritech world could make a contribution. We are solutions providers – come to us with a problem, and we help you solve it. When we looked at the market, while we could see technical opportunities, we didn’t find the people with a problem to solve. Were we looking in the wrong places, telling the wrong story, or had we just misunderstood what was going on? If we are to contribute to the agritech market we need to find partners who