The Fourth Industrial Revolution – We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Introduction

The following table has been around for many years and reflects four key statements that everyone should recognise. Whilst it may not have been “invented” by Donald Rumsfeld, he brought it to the fore in 2002.

From a brief internet search and summation of the input, the next graphic puts the relevance of these questions into perspective:

Industrial developments and innovation by individuals, academia or manufacturers focus by default on the three smaller of these areas which underlines the issue that there is a high percentage of things we don’t know that we don’t know. We should now discuss why this is important, especially to Industry.

Discussion

Adding a little more detail around these quadrants in manufacturing terms will help our understanding of why we are where we are and then consider some ideas about what we can do about it.

1. Know that you know. Manufacturers understand this and it forms the basis of continuous improvements. For example, “we know our product scrappage rates are high and they cost us an additional x% in raw materials per year. We have set KPIs across the business that will focus departments on making changes to reduce this percentage and we know that each % point will recover £y. This will make us more profitable or maintain our competitiveness.” Even more simply, the investment part of the annual budget expects a positive return, thus the issue has been specified, reviewed and processed long before the money is allocated and reflects investment on process and product.
2. Know that you don’t know. This one is easy to understand. For example, an individual or company understands what they want but do not have a solution. This area is key to innovation, as the problem with a product or a measurement or even a more basic lack of knowledge, is or can be defined and thus ideas can be formed to solve the problem.
3. Don’t know that you know. In this instance, for example, you do not know why there is a yield problem, but there is sufficient data available that, if used correctly, will provide an answer as you know the questions to ask. The idea of brainstorming comes to mind in that it is believed that there is an answer to a problem in the room, but without discussing it, you cannot unearth it.
   

Each of these first three provide questions and answers that can be addressed quickly. For companies, this typically means an urgent response to a problem, or within the annual budget cycle. In addition, you have specified a solution and Engineers are far more relaxed when working to specifications.

Those addressing issues of productivity in industrial processes, understand these three segments and the developments they bring. Manufacturers who make products for consumption take advantage of the next generation of equipment that comes onto the market to improve their end products and production facilities.

The supporting industries, for example in the control and instrumentation arenas, develop better instrumentation and control products to solve their customers issues, and the universities develop or innovate ideas to feed in to them.

Suppliers and manufacturers see these as iterative quick wins. There are many examples of these basic innovations, however, I would argue that these are short term approaches that solve issues with annual business fiscal returns. In other words, companies are attempting to squeeze the last remaining drops of productivity from the existing processes.

In the manufacturing circles, it is taken for granted that the basic tools are in continuous improvement cycles for the supporting technologies. CPUs gain performance on a monthly basis allowing software to perform faster. Software operating systems and associated tools from spreadsheets to databases allow businesses to view data in new ways.

Communications systems develop to handle higher and higher bandwidths and datacentres provide cloud based distributed storage and processing. Control systems develop to become more effective and enable process vessels or production lines to produce more high-quality products faster and with less wastage.

University research focuses on ways to do the detail more effectively. Taking advantage of chemical innovations or data processing of highly complex signal processing algorithms, they provide the science for the next cycle of materials or instrumentation.

Whilst all of these are innovative, in many cases, they are basically improvements over what we have already and thus the global manufacturing industry moves on as one.

Addressing these keeps the UK process industries up with the pack.
The biggest question remains in that “we don’t know what we don’t know” and to take advantage of the 4th Industrial revolution, I would suggest that this has to be an area that we focus on as this would enable manufacturing in the UK to take a real lead.

Proposal

So, how do we approach this as an opportunity?

The foundations of the 4IR are already in progress. They address the areas where government can take active involvement in education, legislation and taxation. They can support initiatives with grants to universities and industry to enable them to cross the valley of death, the space between a table top idea to a profitable mass-produced product.

So, with the help of the Catapult centres and other similar organisations, moving from left to right is being reviewed and supported. Innovation, by definition, a process of improvement or taking an existing process into a new area, occurs reasonably easily, but having that light-bulb moment that provides something very new and seeing if it can be used in future products is rare.

One of the most successful recent inventions would be the laser. No one really knew what to do with it. It was not invented in response to a known problem, but now it is key to communications, measurements and welding, to name three. This could be considered a solution to the position that we don’t know what we don’t know.

What is missing is innovation from right to left, i.e. from manufacturing back into the laboratories. It is often lacking because it is expensive, risky and time consuming and comes a lowly fourth to the industrial needs of; keeping their customer engaged, increasing market share and increasing profits for shareholders.

GAMBICA recently commissioned a short video to be made by a number of 13-15 year olds as part of their studies. Before we could focus on the video and what the message was, we discussed “what is engineering?”. After this, we asked them what, if they were Engineers, they would invent. We had a wide and varied collection of ideas that were by what I perceived as an Engineer of some 40 years, bonkers. At this point you need to take a breath.

When you are 13 years old, you tend not to see obstacles and everything is possible. The point here is that these young people were answering the question, we don’t know that we don’t know.

We need to look at things with fresh eyes. In the process industries, as with many others, we take on apprentices and graduates and teach them the underlying science to do their jobs and indoctrinate them with the processes and procedures to work in our organisations. What we do not do is let their minds wander.

Now come two suggestions.​

1. ​​Companies should run quarterly sessions with all their apprentices and sub 25-year- old employees. The forum would be to allow them to come up with ideas, new processes, “what if we had?” questions that could all be put in the pot. There are no rules, just the ideas from the new generation who have, unlike the majority of the Engineering labour market, grown up with new technologies and the ever-changing  world of technology and are now being exposed to manufacturing.
2. ​For each new project, allow a project team 2 weeks (for example) to come up with a new way of delivering the project. A younger team will be creative and imaginative and there is always the backstop to mitigate risk, return to the same way you did it before.
3. If I had a third, I would add it here. This is for the people reading this to do. If we address the question, we don’t know what we don’t know, we move it to we know what we know, before the competition and then all bets against the UK’s progress are off.