The future is decentralized!

The European industry has a leadership in engineering and is proud of providing factories, machines and goods which are the best in the world. But during the past years companies struggling with innovation. We use words like ‘digitization’ and fourth industrial revolution but invest often only in product enhancements and make the same old things with some digital upgrades.

Tomorrows industry is always digital.

The fourth industrial revolution is not about product enhancements, it was born of digitization. Today’s production lines, based on machines all performing the same tasks to produce same products will not be the future. We will see highly customized goods, specific for individual demand but based on industrial standards and mass production. The fourth industrial revolution is about self-running intelligent fabrics, products communicating with machines and new concepts of mobile life. And especially, it’s about cooperation.

Innovation cannot be achieved by a single company.

The complexity of products and the degree of specialization is growing. This trend will increase over the next years and decades. A single company will not be able to produce marketable goods on their own. Today, cooperation is of the utmost importance for the success of companies in global markets. Market leaders will excite their customers by combing services of different, highly specialized partners, according to the customers demand. Therefore we have to rethink cooperation. Today cooperation is characterized by rigid supply chains between fixed partners. This supply chains are often hierarchical and dominated by a few companies. What works very well in the previous industrial ages, driven by mass production and information technology, completely fails in the age of the industrial internet. What we need today is a dynamic cooperation in flexible partner networks where companies interact with each other on eye-level. This requires a strong rethinking in the way, companies interact with partners but it requires also new methods of reliable, fast and dynamic collaboration in partner ecosystems.

Systems of central collaboration are dead.

In almost every industry, cooperation with partners is based on central marketplaces or systems, provided by one of the partners. With the result that you are losing the sovereignty over your data and over your customers with every single transaction. Worse than that, this kind of rigid integration is not suitable for today’s cooperation dynamics and certainly not at all if the dynamic continues to increase. To protect data you will not share and to handle demand changes, we fall back to manual communication mechanisms and exchange data by mail, phone or similar manual ways.

This is not clever or smart. This is a fail. Especially considering that data is the most important currency and efficient but flexible cooperation will be the most important success factor in the future.

Blockchain means decentralization, really?

What do companies that have already recognized the risk of not being flexible and potentially losing their own data? They invest in the decentralized miracle cure blockchain. Even if sometimes they have no clue what it is or how it works. But here is the bad message — today public blockchains are not enterprise ready. Totally not. The architecture of the technology makes that transactions are slow, not trustfully and energy wasting. Every company who try to work with a public blockchain will realize this. Some earlier some later.

So the reaction of companies who realized this is: “Come on! We build our own blockchain solution as a private chain.” Surely you can do that. As well as you can paint your 23 years old corolla in a new color and say to your neighbors: “Hey guys — this is my brand-new car!”. Because the truth is that if companies build their own private blockchain solutions they get the same central storages they already have only based on a new technology and without any real benefits.

But to be honest since we started to develop our solution two years ago, we built in various pilot projects the same private blockchain solutions for companies like audi, sandvik or bosch. So to stay in the picture we painted a scrap wrecked car in a new color and we were surprised why it still does not go faster. In this time we realized that it makes no sense to build private chain after private chain because you can benefit from the huge possibilities of blockchain technology only if you use it in form of a decentralized network.

What companies need to understand is that a single company can’t be the owner of a decentralized network. But companies together they can and actually this is the idea behind the evan.network.

So we decided to change our way, give open access to our technology and build and open ecosystem based its partners. With evan.network we initiate the building of an enterprise ready, cross-industry business network. This network is based on blockchain technology, operated and owned by trustful European companies as partners of the evan.network.

So we speak about a real decentralized ecosystem where any company, developer … whoever can use the enterprise ready services and build their own industry-specific, decentralized business model on blockchain technology.

We believe that such an ecosystem for efficient, dynamic and trustful cooperation is the only way to become ready for tomorrows markets.

What are the next steps and what we are looking for now?

We cannot build the network alone. An ecosystem lives on its partners. That’s why we currently form a team of initial evan.network partners, with whom together we build the organizational structure for a future proof business network.

Concretely we have an eye on companies, who are interested in using blockchain technology to improve the way how they cooperate with partners. And companies who are interested in to find completely new business models based on cooperation.

We already have four big partners out of the automotive, recycling and maintenance area who believes in our idea. In the first step there is space for three to six partners more in who are interested in to build a blockchain with European trust, based on an existing enterprise ready blockchain technology.

I’m really looking forward to explain to you the deeper technical and conceptual facts of our solution and the different possibilities to participate as a partner of the evan.network.