Guest blog by Martin Shouler, Arup
How digital disruption is set to impact the water sector
As mentioned in one of our most recent blogs, digital disruptions hold great potential for innovation in the water sector. We’ve seen in other sectors that new scalable, customer-centric, digitally networked business models, like those of Amazon, Google, Uber and Airbnb are not only ‘game changers’ for customers, but are also affecting service, growth, scale and revenue potential for companies in every industry.
The advent of the fourth industrial revolution clearly indicates that even if this seismic shift may seem a distant concern to some industries, the trend is not unique to digital start-ups and tech-superstars: it will affect every sector.
The first industrial revolution was steam-powered; the second electrical; the third signalled the birth of the age of computing.
The fourth industrial revolution is the era in which we witness a fusion of technologies coming together – for example the Internet of Things, 3D printing, genetic editing, machine learning, robotics, mobile supercomputing and much more.
Although previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people, this fourth industrial revolution is fundamentally different and is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.