We Ask the Xconomists: Some Quick Predictions for the New Year

Rolling Over New Year 2014

As 2013 drew to a close, we asked some of our Xconomists to ponder innovation, past and future, and to give us their predictions for the breakout innovations they expect to see in their respective fields. Here’s what they had to say:

Texas Xconomist Blair Garrou, managing director at Mercury Fund in Houston:

Blair GarrouI’m excited about an investment theme we’ve been working on closely—the consumerization of the industrial Internet—which we believe will truly start to take shape in 2014. The traditional “consumerization of IT” theme has really only taken hold in progressive industries such as financial services and high tech. Industrial companies (energy, utilities, and manufacturing) are much slower to change, but now have begun embracing emerging trends in cloud, SaaS, mobile, and social, and the all-encompassing “Internet of things.” The difference is that these platforms must conform to meet the industrial company’s needs—where conversations occur around “assets” rather than people, and mobile app frameworks are built around infrastructure that is secure, highly scalable, and can guarantee “4 9’s” SLAs [IT service-level agreements available 99.99 percent of the time].


Ramesh Rao, director of the San Diego Division of CalIT2:

Ramesh RaoThe single most sobering event of the year was the large-scale loss of trust in online privacy safeguards. I think this will have far-reaching implications for IT infrastructure. I realize that this is a dark development to highlight, but Edward Snowden’s actions will unleash a new era of technology measures needed to re-engineer trust.

Wisconsin Xconomist Laura Strong, COO of Quintessence Biosciences:

lstrong-843The breakthrough innovation of next year isn’t new, at all, but improved use of existing technology: social media. Pharma and biotech are on the tailing edge of using these tools to add value to their customers, whether you consider them to be patients, doctors, or payers. In oncology, patient-focused groups are leading the way in creating places and situations where patients can share and learn, not only from each other but doctors and researchers. As with all innovation, the need to invest for the long term and the risks of failure are working against adoption. I hope 2014 will be

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.