In a weekly column, alternately written by Lucien Engelen, Maarten Steinbuch, Carlo van de Weijer, Daan Kersten and Tessie Hartjes, E52 tries to find out what the future will look like. All five contributors are all working on technologies that can provide solutions to the problems of our time. This Sunday, it’s Daan Kersten‘s turn.
Here are all the prior editions of [TOMORROW IS GOOD]
“Using the knowledge and experience of others to accelerate the development and launch a product: much more efficient than doing it all by yourself”,
As I write this, it is raining outside, hopefully tomorrow (the weather) will be good, although my daughter loves rain. The climate at home is certainly quite cleared up after my kids finishing their final exams during the test week. Now fingers crossed that the results will be good tomorrow.
This week was marked by exponential growth. First, a round table discussion about the unique potential of our high-tech ecosystem for hardware startups. In the Netherlands and especially in Eindhoven one can find the most advanced specialists in all disciplines involved in the development and construction of high-tech equipment, particularly when optics play a central role. This network of experts offers a wonderful ‘launch platform for new businesses’, as we have experienced with our company in the development and launch of our 3D metal printer. A nice comparison arises with the SES-10 launch of SpaceX this week. Elon Musk’s space company this week successfully launched its first recycled rocket.
Impressive and inspiring to see how the entire company empathises and cheers during launch and landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that had already been used before in April 2016 with another successful space mission. The clear sky beautifully shows how the nine engines are slowly increased to the maximum propulsion. By reusing the propulsion stage of the rocket, space flights are becoming much cheaper, an important objective of Musk. In addition, it shortens the time until a new launch. Actually, the Dutch high tech ecosystem operates in the same way. The development partners and suppliers are working for different companies (missions) and their knowledge and experience are used to accelerate the development and launch of a product. Moreover, this is much cheaper than when you would do it all by yourself.
Kevin Kelly
When it comes to knowledge, this was a wonderful week for fans of technology. Singularity University The Netherlands and STRP festival jointly invited Kevin Kelly, former editor and founder of WIRED to Eindhoven. He masterfully showed how technology will develop in the next decades and what the impact of this will be on our lives, our work and the world around us. How Virtual and Augmented Reality will come together in Mixed Reality. How robots will further push up our productivity. How artificial intelligence will conquer our manufacturing industry and how we will get access to everything we want without owning anything. The way he outlined it, I am reassured again and I know for sure that tomorrow is good!
I wish you all a beautiful Sunday with a sunny sky!
