Building the future, together

Innovations from around the world and across disciplines will reshape the way we live and work—reinventing supply chains in the process.

Photo created by Open AI's DALL·E.

I need your help—please share your insights in my continuing survey of reader perspectives on innovation. Last week’s response was fantastic, with many ideas and experiences offered for building a supply chain worthy of our times. I’m keeping the survey open and ask that you take a few minutes to share your perspectives. I am planning changes to this newsletter, and your input is essential. Please click here or on the button below. It’s a short survey and will require only a few minutes of your time. In the meantime, I share a few highlights from The World Innovation Network’s annual meeting, TWIN Global 2023, Proximity: Opportunities, Risks, and the Lives We Desire. (Click here for TWIN’s mission and a full agenda.)

Innovating with proximity

TWIN is a community of leading-edge innovators representing business, science, government, arts, and philanthropy. It’s a place to share ideas, push boundaries, make contacts, and collaborate. This year, we explored innovations in virtual reality, healthcare, film, agriculture, energy, artificial intelligence, sustainability, music, and more.

Many sessions explored proximity—the use of technology to shorten the time between recognizing a need and its fulfillment, with outcomes created as close as possible to the physical location where the need exists. Have you heard of distributed energy, agriculture, or healthcare? All are trends aimed at achieving proximity, and all have critical implications for the future of distribution and the supply chain:

• Distributed energy. Batteries and renewable energies are restructuring the power grid, moving energy production away from large-scale power plants to points spread across geographies, close to where vehicles, equipment, building, and homes need power. If you are unfamiliar with distributed energy, click here for an introduction by Siemens. 

• Distributed agriculture. Local, community-focused sources for agricultural products offer healthy food consumed in restaurants and meals prepared at homes, creating alternatives to industrial farming, ranching, and food processing factories. Click here for a Harvard Business Review podcast on vertical farming and distributed agriculture.

• Distributed healthcare. Micro-hospitals offer emergency and operating rooms, clinics and in-patient care, lab services, imaging, labor and delivery, pharmacy services, and more, housed in a single building and tailored to fill local gaps when patients cannot travel to distant mega-hospitals or regional healthcare campuses.  

Foresight and footsteps

Each of these trends holds many possibilities for shaping the future of distribution and the supply chain. In future editions, I will share stories of innovators working to make them happen. If you have questions, examples, or introductions, please send them. For now, please complete my survey by clicking here or on the button below.

About the image: I asked Dall-E to depict a city block with electric cars, solar power, an urban farm, and a micro-hospital. Dall-E is an artificial intelligence tool offered by OpenAI, which brings us Chatgbt. After several tries, this is the best I got. Please send me your work if you can do better, and I will share it with attribution. I’m wondering if I can use AI to help create visions of a future supply chain and its customers, adding artwork to this newsletter. Your help is greatly appreciated!

As always, please leave comments below or reach out at mark.dancer@n4bi.com. I am excited to hear your innovation stories and challenges and work towards the future together.