Industrial Internet

Chapter 4. The role of Silicon Valley in creating the industrial internet

A new kind of hardware alpha-geek will approach those areas of the industrial internet where the challenges are principally software challenges. Cheap, easy-to-program microcontrollers; powerful open-source software; and the support of hardware collectives and innovation labs^[41] make it possible for enthusiasts and minimally-funded entrepreneurs to create sophisticated projects of the sort that would have been available only to well-funded electrical engineers just a few years ago — anything from autonomous cars to small-scale industrial robots.

In the same way that expertise in software isn’t necessary to create a successful Web app, expertise barriers will fall in software-machine interfaces, opening innovation to a big, broad, smart community.

Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, compares the development of the amateur hardware movement to the development of the computer from mainframe to minicomputer to hobbyist computer and then to the ubiquitous personal computer. “We’re precisely at the transition from the minicomputer to the hobbyist computer,” he told a conference audience recently. He foresees a worldwide system of fabrication labs that produce physical objects locally, but are linked globally by information networks, enabling expertise to quickly dissimilate.

In complex, critical systems, clients will continue to demand the involvement of experienced industrial firms ...