2023-Japan-TechNext

CHERIF GAMRA: Hello, everyone. My name is Cherif. I'm very excited to be here and tell you about TechNext. But before I do that, I would to start by telling you how TechNext was born. Some of the founding members of TechNext who worked at companies such as Ford and Honda here in Japan have been looking for a good way to forecast technology quantitatively, systematically, without being influenced by what you see in the news and in the media. So that's how TechNext was started.

Let's see here. So the problem that we're trying to tackle is a problem that many of you are familiar with, and that is R&D investments-- how to make the most out of it. We have noticed that R&D is getting harder. Companies may cut staff, even fire people, or even not do advertising, but they will keep increasing R&D investment by fear that somebody may leapfrog them or come up with a better product or service.

These are some of the mentions and accolades that TechNext has gotten. Some Wall Street Journal articles, The Financial Times-- we present a CNBC conferences and so on. And we are currently executing about $2.5 million in contracts with the US Air Force, VC funds, large think tanks out of DC and so on.

And this is one of the main reasons why we are here. Since inception, TechNext has been having very meaningful conversations with Japanese conglomerates and technology companies giving their heavy investments in research and development.

This is a screenshot taken from one of our solutions where we are trying to make technology forecasting and horizon scanning basically as easy as a Google search. What you see here on the screens is two technologies being compared. And we can tell you when, in the future, technology A may be better than technology B. Whether you're looking at two or 2,000 technologies, we can generate these forecasts instantaneously.

Now this is part of the secret sauce that goes into TechNext. TechNext builds on about 20 years of research at MIT. On top of that, we have one of the largest data sets of empirical performance on technologies.

We basically analyze the patent network in a way that is very similar as to how Google analyzes web pages using leading edge machine learning and data science. And we currently have a catalog dynamic of about 150,000 technologies at different levels of granularity, which is changing every day, which is one of the largest in the world as we know of.

Now this is what matters to you. How does this impact my company, my organization, or my group? Number one-- we can help you identify which disruptive technologies you should be looking out for whether they're coming from inside your organization or outside of it, local or international, a startup or a large organization. Number two-- technology acquisition. Who should you hire for a given technological field? Which startup you need to invest in, which division of another company you need to acquire, or even which patents you need to buy.

Number three-- you can look inwards as well as outwards. You can analyze competitor strategies to see what other large organizations are doing and understand their strategy. And then, finally, our primary goal is to help you increase your return on investment whether for your local R&D or through acquisitions.

I myself used to work with some of these companies that you see the logos of. And this is how some of you are currently doing technology forecasting or technology scanning. Now what TechNext proposes is a paradigm shift when it comes to technology. We have the first technology operating system just like a Windows operating system, Android operating system-- we have the first technology operating system, which number one, gives you instantaneous in a second technology forecast.

Number two-- it is orders of magnitude cheaper than any report you can get out there, or research paper, or analysis. And then number three-- this is not a black box. Our research is peer-reviewed. You can find it out in the open in the research papers, and you understand how we get to these forecasts. And none of it is biased. It's objective, and instantaneous, and systematic, unlike what you can find in the reports or from other companies.

Finally, after getting to this point, a lot of people say, well, this sounds almost too good to be true. This is like magic-- a crystal ball into the future. Well what we do then is we back test. We analyze our forecasts against the real empirical data. And as you can see here on the slides, the black line is what actually happened.

The colored lines are the TechNext forecast at different points in time while we hide data for the future. The first two forecasts are a little bit off, but then the other ones, which are five, 10, 15, and 20 years ahead of time, are very close to the actual technological metrics.

I'm going to skip over this slide in the interest of time, but this slide here was generated for the United States Navy to show them how the improvement rates that we generate can be done at different levels of the organization to help decision making at the top level, middle management, as well as day-to-day research by the teams and the research teams.

This is a decomposition of a predator drone that we showed to members of the DoD and DoD organization to help them prioritize their R&D investments-- what to invest more in, what to invest less in, and what to completely cut off and where surprises may come from.

Finally-- this is just an example of Kodak-- how Kodak for years have been using photographic film as a flagship product but failed to see that digital cameras, which actually were invented at Kodak, will become better, faster, cheaper, stronger than what they currently have. But if you look at the improvement rates, which are the percentages on the slides, you can see how that products, that many of you have products in R&D and current cash cows, may become better than the other one.

Finally, this is what we propose. It's not an incremental improvement. It's not improving your R&D by 3% or 5% or revenue by 1%. What we propose is to reinvent the company-- reinvent the organization around the most promising technologies to ensure long term technological supremacy for the organization. So with that, I would like to thank all of you for your attention, and I'll look forward to chatting with you in front of our booth. Thank you.

SPEAKER: Thanks, Cherif.