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Recent research paints a somewhat bleak picture of the innovativeness of the Dutch manufacturing industry: Dutch manufacturing companies are often lagging behind in technological developments. Compared to the rest of the world, the Dutch manufacturing industry is less optimistic about future revenue growth and the potential efficiency advantage that can be gained by investing more in innovative technologies. Companies are unjustly ignoring emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and virtual reality. It is essential for Dutch organizations within the manufacturing industry to seize the opportunities presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the coming period. If they fail to do so in time, the gap with Asian players may become insurmountable.
Therefore, we all need to fully engage in innovation if we want to keep up in the tech world. Before we know it, we might find ourselves sidelined (just like in the current World Cup). However, it is quite a leap to suddenly focus entirely on a technology like blockchain. Is blockchain technology mature enough to be applied on a large scale (beyond its proven use as a cryptocurrency)? Or is it mostly just a hype?
In reality, one would want to experiment on a small scale first. A team of smart students (male and female) could be tasked with building dedicated proof-of-concepts and demos. Let them go through several iterative cycles to explore the applicability of a technology. By actively working with new technologies (rather than just discussing them), the threshold to innovation suddenly becomes much lower. The ICT Lab Utrecht provides such an accessible experimenting environment.
At the ICT Lab Utrecht, vocational and higher education students in ICT work on practical issues related to blockchain, IoT, data science, and machine learning. In a short period, they develop an innovative idea into a proof-of-concept or demo. The students are guided by experienced consultants who are also eager to work with these new technologies. Over the past months, the ICT Lab has worked on projects such as a smart watch zone for detecting bike theft, assessed the use of data science in predicting the impact of infrastructure changes on 'bike traffic jams' at intersections, explored ways to use open data to detect local hotspots in healthcare, and made an initial proposal for using blockchain to digitize vaccination records.
