What does the factory of the future look like?

The intersection of factories and internet represents a huge opportunity. First there was steam powered, then mass production using electricity and finally the programmable logic that led to robots. However the factory is still rather inflexible and difficult to access in a very dynamic world. Those companies that have adapted their supply chain technology to meet the requirements of a dynamic world have reaped the benefits (Zara is a great example), however these are still the exception rather than the rule.

This deck from Innovation agency FaberNovel does a great job of covering the opportunity and is worth a look (embedding in Medium seems to fail)

Standout start-ups in the space

There are already several start-ups disrupting this space including the following;

Unmade are leveraging underused clothing production machines to enable small runs of custom designs (worth checking out just for the fun website).

Concirrus provides an easy to use platform that enables monitoring and optimisation right across the supply chain (firmly in the Internet of Things category).

Automata looked at the long tail of the market and have built software that makes it really easy for smaller factories to train robots.

Know other examples? Have further ideas for this post? Send me a message on twitter, I would love to hear from you.