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Leading the trends

Who needs to keep track of technological development trends and why? Startups: is it worth spending your life on something that will not be needed after 5 years? Venture investors: what to invest in? How not to run into a soap bubble? To large business: what investments will allow to overtake competitors? Is it time to invest in technology X or is it too late, or is it still to wait? State institutions: what technologies can improve the quality of life? Educational institutions: what to teach students? How to ensure that educational programs comply with constantly changing labor market requirements? How to stop releasing unclaimed specialists?

All of us: what specialty to choose for training? Which institute to go to? What area to choose for work? Which company will not fall apart in a year? How to understand that your entrepreneurial idea is in demand and long-term? My name is Pavel Krasovsky, I’m the deputy director of the Center for Strategic Innovation in Rostelecom, and I want to talk about the trend tracking system that we created, how and why we started it, what it works for and what our plans are. But let's start in order, and in this post - with the problems.





Probably, someone will be surprised that Rostelecom not only puts payphones and cable leads to apartments, but it is. From year to year, revenue from new “non-Telecom” products and services is constantly growing . Rostelecom is developing the Internet of things, cybersecurity, biometrics, quantum communications, and much more.

Whoever you are, even a garage startup, even a transnational corporation, in whatever position you are, showing double-digit growth or proximity to bankruptcy, everyone needs to introduce new technologies into their business, otherwise you will become uncompetitive.

In terms of capitalization and growth rate over some 10-20 years, dramatic changes have occurred. Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and their Chinese counterparts have shifted from the pedestaland GE, HP, Yahoo, and others.

If you delve into history, this trend can be traced even more clearly.

What industrial revolutions taught us


It was they who ensured the abrupt development of technologies, the growth of the value of companies, the new quality of life of citizens and the economic growth of entire states. Starting with the first industrial revolution, the general principle of "whoever rose first, that and slippers."

For example, in the mid-17th century a steam engine and textile production appeared in Great Britain. The British quickly receive patents for the appropriate devices and technologies, timely assessing their relevance and benefits, eventually bringing the country's industry to a new level.

Watt's steam engines (pumped version of Thomas Severi's water pump) appeared in 1778. And already in 1810 there were 5,000 such machines in the country. By 1825 - 15,000. For those times it was almost as complex as launching a reusable rocket into space now.



And the same with metallurgy, textiles and engineering. Products become better, have a dramatic impact on the technology of their time, improving and pushing some of them forward and leaving others in the past (or at the level of crafts and hobbies). As a result of such a policy, Great Britain has become a world technology leader.


Estimation of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity

Here is the main message here. If you noticed in time that some kind of innovation could “shoot” in the near future - don’t sleep, it can help you earn money, and it’s better to make the world. The example of other industrial revolutions only confirms this. Digital revolution, personal computers, the Internet: who invested at the start, who headed and helped develop, he collected all the cream. The fourth industrial revolution, the so-called "Industry 4.0", which is now being repeated from every toaster, is no exception. You probably often notice news about the development of the Internet of things and other technologies that will make it easier both the life of every person in everyday life and the working conditions in large industries due to robotics and new systems. And this is clearly just the beginning.


Technological trends - the "rails" of industrial revolutions

What to do to stay competitive


First of all, do not be afraid to invest in new technologies at the very start. But if with the attachments themselves, as such, everything is pretty obvious, then with the attachment object you still need to very carefully determine. Now is not the 17th century, when, in principle, few innovations were proposed. Our level of information noise is such that in a week you can collect hundreds of unique offers and innovative technologies, each of which considers itself capable of changing the world and encourages investments. It is clear that many of these startups are cute fantasies of the startups themselves, who have nothing to do with reality , but are desperately hungry for funding.

Take the same Teranos, who claimed that he had found a method for a drop of blood to conduct several dozen tests. In the early 2000s, he was considered one of the most successful startups, more than 15 investment funds invested $ 1.4 billion in it. What did all this lead to? To a number of fraud courts and a series on the topic. In principle, the exhaust too, but investors and Elizabeth were clearly expecting something else.



Or stories about how the addition of the word blockchain to the name of the company in 2017 raised capitalization by 10 times. Now there are no such ratings and you will not find those startups.

Therefore, it is important not only to “catch” trends, but also to filter them carefully, and also to understand the causes and consequences of the development of technologies, because the number of new technologies amounts to hundreds, if not thousands.

For Rostelecom, this is also relevant, on the one hand, Rostelecom is a huge company. Almost all the backbone networks in the Russian Federation are ours, we are the actual infrastructural basis of the new industrial revolution, and we are putting all our efforts and expertise into the creation of new digital products and services. There are resources, opportunities too. On the other hand, resources (primarily human resources) are still limited, therefore, in our experience, we need to focus on no more than 5-7 the most top-notch and promising technologies.

What methods for assessing technological maturity exist?


To be on the subject of innovation, analysts usually read news, magazines, blogs, telegram channels, etc. They go to conferences. For special tasks for a project, market assessments, information about companies and startups, company patents and scientific publications are usually studied.

In order to receive information from the “one window” for almost each of the listed sources, there is an aggregator that collects all the data and even has the analytics function for this data. For example, PR managers no longer need to manually comb the entire Internet with references to their company, and then filter them by tonality, there are systems that will do everything for you: analyze the content and issue a report. And there are similar aggregators for scientific articles, patents, venture deals.

In addition to sources with information, there are many agencies that pass all this information through themselves and give forecasts on various topics. Among them there are whales, for example, Gartner, McKinsey, etc., whose professionalism is not customary to be questioned, and all their reports are usually used in the same way as the Almanac from Back to the Future. In addition to consulting companies, there are state organizations that develop similar forecasts for their needs, for example, the American NASA and RAND, as well as the European Union for the Horizon 2020 program.


World experience in technology development assessment

There are two conventional methods for creating such forecasts: “qualitative” and “quantitative”. High-quality is based on the opinion of several experts who, in theory, should personify the entire field of study. Quantitative should be based on measurable indicators, for example, the volume of investments, the number of people developing a certain technology, etc.

Today, consulting agencies and foresight centers in the vast majority of cases use quality research. That is, representatives of consulting agencies are actively interviewing experts. More often dozens of experts participate in the polls, less often hundreds and thousands. This approach has a number of drawbacks: you cannot interview absolutely all experts and it is impossible to do such surveys often, this is a rather time-consuming process. Plus, it is not known who these experts are. Plus the bias factor of these experts. Moreover, research laboratories themselves, for various reasons, may be interested in one trend above the other, and may contribute to this.

And the research methodology, as you know, is not the most open thing. Therefore, even using someone’s reports, you cannot be completely sure that the data for the reports would be collected according to the methodology that suits you. Consulting agencies themselves are no longer satisfied with the qualitative approach; the most advanced of them are beginning to introduce quantitative assessment methods into their research.

Remember this, when you see the next “10/20/50/100500 trends of this year”, try to find the methodology for this forecast and realize that it is often simply not there.

All this information flow is processed by analysts. We also have them and they are cool. But there are few of them, there is more and more data every day, and, firstly, there are no more analysts and, secondly, the resources of each individual analyst are limited. Accordingly, the gap widens, and the further you go, the more information there will be that will remain unprocessed.

What do we have:

  • A variety of data sources (scientific publications, patent databases, information on venture transactions, etc.), a huge amount of data
  • A large number of reports of consulting agencies with an opaque technique, published at best once a year.
  • A small team of in-house analysts.

How to conduct a quantitative analysis qualitatively


I hope I managed to convince you that without understanding the trends in technological development, an innovative business cannot be built.

Now about how to identify them with a high degree of certainty.

In any large company, there are many business units / departments / units / subsidiaries that develop new technologies in one way or another. Rostelecom also has a lot of them, for example, R&D, venture capital fund, food offices, subsidiaries and affiliates, etc. At different stages of technology development, the company invests differently in technology. For example, only nascent quantum technologies through R&D, the industrial Internet, in which many pilots appear, through design and product offices, cybersecurity, which is a sustainable business, through subsidiaries and affiliates, and so on.

Our needs, like most large technology companies, are as follows:

  • technology reports for different departments with different levels of immersion: top management, venture capital fund, product offices, R&D, HR, PR and more.
  • methodology transparency, minimum subjectivity, maximum data usage
  • reports on different sections: industries, countries, dynamics over time, stage of development of technology, etc.
  • the ability to set the frequency of reports (once a year / quarter / week / day).

We didn’t find such solutions in the analytics market and went along the path “No to the market - do it yourself”, and in 2016 we decided to develop our own system with preference and poetesses, data and machine learning. This is the only way to be sure of the assessment of those promising technological areas that we are tracking.

To understand which tool to use for the development of technology, it is necessary to correctly determine the stage of development of the trend. To do this, you need to dissect the trend, understand where and how it appears (for example, holographic television), how it acquires early followers (for example, invasive RFID ) and how it comes to the state that without this technology it is impossible to imagine life (for example, GPS ).

We divide the trend into 5 stages (it is clear that this list is conditional and there are exceptions):

  1. . . , , .. .
  2. . . .
  3. . , , .
  4. . , .
  5. . , . , — , . , Apple , , 10 — 2009 .


Trend Anatomy

Today, each stage is digitized and this knowledge is contained in specialized sources that can be studied by automated means.

For three years, we drove through our monitoring system more than 5.3 million scientific publications, 5 million patents, information on investments worth $ 2.1 trillion, information on 1.6 million vacancies and 22.8 million resumes, 370 thousand media publications. And over the past few years, we have steadily increased our competencies in NLP, and now we can extract the value we need from documents using linguistic analysis.

In the next post I will tell in more detail why we chose this approach, which sources are most valuable to us, how we can look for “bubbles” and what technologies we use for analysis.

If you have any questions - write in the comments, I will try to give answers to them in the next post.

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