CogniGron Seminar: Xavi Marti (IGSresearch and Czech Academy of Sciences) - "Internet of Things and interdisciplinary academic research"

Many years ago, as a student, I spent nearly all summer periods working in the petrochemical companies around my home town, Tarragona. Back then, dressed in blue, I’d work in the maintenance of thousands of sensors. Everything was in perfect sync to avoid a catastrophe or loss of profit for each instant of non optimal operation. During my post-doc in Berkeley I became an Internet of Things (IoT) entrepreneur. According to the World Economic Forum [1], more than 70% IoT deployments are unable to go beyond the pilot stage. I can’t stop asking myself why SHELL or REPSOL could encompass zillions of sensors since the 1970s, without artificial intelligence or big-data, while modern start-ups struggle to align a thousand parking sensors in the street for more than two years. There are some quick trivial answers to this question but we will unravel the issue in detail during my talk. Let me be honest: my start-up has had more failures than successes. That’s why we probably survived only by bouncing back and forth around interdisciplinary academic funding. Last year, I crossed my soft red line for personal economic losses and I decided to halt, rethink and reinvent our business model. I want to share my experience on this front with you. I can’t go back to investors without a sustainable business model. By accident, I came across a Herbert Jaeger’s talk (with that inspiring plane taking off on the last slide) – that’s why I came to CogniGron.

References
[1] “The Next Economic Growth Engine Scaling Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies in Production”, World Economic Forum, White Paper, January 2018.