Webinar Recap: The 4th Industrial Revolution: Industry Trend

July 7th, 2021 by Thea Maisuradze

On July 1st, Inflectra and Sriram Rajagopalan, Ph.D., hosted a webinar on the 4th Industrial Revolution: Industry Trends Post COVID-19, covering the following areas of interest:

Overview of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR): cyber-physical systems and a transition past the 3rd Industrial Revolution
Introduction to the Six Global Megatrends: globalization 2.0, technological convergence, a digital era of 4IR
Lessons learned from COVID-19: impact on industries and acceleration of trends
The emergence of risk management as a cross-functional domain across all roles and products in the enterprise.

The webinar presentation, blog, and recording are enclosed here👇

The 4th Industrial Revolution & COVID-19: The Theoretical Framework

Every failure teaches a lesson. If we have not learned from that failure, we have paid a huge price and not benefited from the lessons to turn failure into success. The COVID-19 pandemic has globally impacted individuals, businesses, societies, and countries in many ways. Yet, it leaves all of us with one powerful lesson that we should all learn from. This powerful lesson has been at the epicenter of the 4th industrial revolution that focused on cyber-physical systems. In many ways, the 4th industrial revolution has greatly influenced several approaches that we have seen in controlling the pandemic by limiting its spread by lockdowns and regulations but also by experimenting through innovation: telecommuting, telehealth, and vaccine development and trial combined with the acceleration of temporary authorization of vaccines.

So, what are these 4th industrial trends? Many of us have been impacted by these trends already, and some organizations have embraced it in many of their products and support successfully. The use of drones for environment control, increasing use of cloud computing beyond the use of just storing documents, predictive data analysis to come up with new solutions and prescriptive client recommendations, the impact of cybersecurity protocols and the threats emanating from the lack of compliance, and the list is endless as a result of the nine pivotal areas where the 4th industrial revolution has an insurmountable role. The border closing and lockdown initiated in many countries phased approaches to reopening and vaccine development & phased distribution seen in the global pandemic is increasingly possible because of some of the advances made before pandemic due to the 4th industrial revolution.

So, has the pandemic changed the goals of the 4th industrial revolution even slightly? What are the foundational principles to this 4th industrial revolution? What important connection runs through both the 4th industrial revolution and the pandemic lessons learned? Please review the webinar, “Influence of COVID-19 on the fourth industrial revolution trends” from Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan, where he unpacks some of the critical elements of the fourth industrial revolution, global megatrends, and lessons learned from COVID-19, along with a tool to incorporate the lesson learned within an organization.