FLUX - The Age of Evidence

And in our emerging network economy, numbers create value. A network’s value grows as more and more people and devices connect to it. The more possibilities we have in a network, the more opportunities open up in front of us. So opening our systems provides opportunities to enhance our understanding, to share our ideas, and to create more value.

But in a network automation and the corresponding algorithms are the key to success and survival. So what are the algorithms, data processing methods and automated processes we should look out for, if we aim for affordability and increasing quality for sustainable energy/public works services? What should we know about them, what can we expect from them, how can we make choices among them, and what do we need to know about their implementation? How can we look beyond “what happened?” and “what can happen?”, and move to the dilemma of “What should we do?” as data-based evidence is replacing the age of estimation, whether we’re talking about navigation, business forecasting and planning, production, financial decisions, health or just sales. We strive to give you practical answers to these questions through the talks and experts of this session.

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Batteries that can be charged in a few minutes, residential walls that ‘eat’ CO2, machine intelligence that teaches itself, quantum computers and decentralized services that rely on block-chain technology. Limestone mines that bind CO2 released from thermal energy plants and cement production technology that doesn’t require high temperatures, kinetic energy generators, solutions recovering hydrogen from water with resonance frequencies, technology implementing wireless energy transmission over long distances, or metal liquid energy storage from elements which can be found in large quantities in nature and assembled to store 1Kwh energy in a device no larger than the size of a pizza. Only a few examples with proven applications in laboratory contexts, which will in all likelihood transform the lives of energy producers, distributors, merchants, consumers and cities in the coming years.

Ever more often we encounter solutions, which upend the foundations of industries and total value chains, in many cases first appearing in completely different fields, so “outside the box” or lateral thinking is no longer an option today, but a basic requirement. Without clear understanding the possibilities of innovations remain hidden to us. And if we have no real meaningful understanding, how can we know where and why these solutions can be useful for us, and in which areas they are not worth implementing? Our speakers in this session will help us map out all this: they simplify the complex avoiding the incomprehensible tech jargon and, building on decades of research, they make these solutions graspable, some of them for planning, some for practical implementation.

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How has this happened, and how does all this work in the complex and digital world we live in, where technologies and competitive advantages become obsolete at an even more breathtaking pace, while the limited access to markets diminish? In this world, the importance of the human workforce is constantly decreasing, and production is increasingly taking place where consumption happens. So the supply chains begin to shrink, while the D2C channel becomes more important. Mass personalization has become a reality, and with it comes micro-segmentation. Users are more informed and better empowered. They teach each other, and regulations follow suit: provisions like the PSD2 or GDPR, or rights to accountability of algorithms, are fundamentally changing the context by ensuring that we must receive an explanation for the background of the decisions made by every machine.

How does all this transform commerce and the value proposition? In which dimensions and in what framework is cooperation between competitors and market players reasonable and possible? Especially in a traditionally centralized industry, whose corporate culture has been formed over many decades of investment in equipment with long lifecycles, and where agility and speed are less characteristic. Our speakers in this session, as well as the participants of the closing roundtable, deal with these issues daily. They are competitors, who work with each other periodically. With their help we will try to learn what value-creation and competitive advantage mean in the era of (decentralized) networks.

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