Transformative technologies and Slovakia's path towards an innovative economy.

Accelerating innovation puts great demands on the private sector and its ability to adapt and to fully benefit from new technologies, as well as on political leadership striving to create an environment where innovative economy can flourish. We've decided to approach experts on the topic of innovation from the private as well as the public sphere, to find out which technology trends they perceive as most impactful for the near future and where do they see Slovakia's advantages and shortcomings in the digital era.

Nima Motazed, Swiss Re Management AG

Q1: What technology changes have the biggest transformative potential to drive business, entrepreneurship and policies within the next few years?

Exponential growth of Machine learning/AI (this is where Swiss Re has huge expertise)

The technology exists, however, the change comes from actually learning how to efficiently use it.

Data science projects becoming the new normal and machine learning integration in all business processes.

Experts in all areas will use data and ML/AI systems as they use Excel today.

Edge computing in conjunction with 5G, further cloud adoption and more powerful mobile devices and IoT - simplifying data transmission and lowering its costs and latency. It will change the architecture of business solutions and open the potential for more efficient and widespread usage of business-critical, real-time applications (also on mobile devices).

Nano Technology and self-driving cars, IoT - changing the overall risk landscape.

Quantum computing and its application in computationally heavy use cases - simulations, cryptography, etc.

Upcoming potential/impacts

Natural language processing/understanding (NLP/NLU), i.e. AI/ML systems that can extract information from non-structured texts.

In many contexts accuracy of ML/AI systems is considered insufficient to make trustworthy decisions, e.g. 98% accuracy is not acceptable in big underwriting decisions. We need to learn to accept that AI is not perfect, but on par with human decision making if not better.

Q2: What is Slovakia's greatest strength and greatest weakness compared to other European countries when it comes to digital and innovative economy?

Education:

Slovakia has a young, well-educated population that is hungry for success.

The education system is not yet adapted to the needs of future ways of working, e.g. collaborative, connected, entrepreneurial.

Education content brings in expert skills but is not agile enough to reflect the need for soft core skills, vital for the changing industry needs.

Industry:

Transformation from heavy industry to IT/knowledge industry.

Slovakia is fairly strong in IT and software development (vendor solutions), however the combination of IT and business expertise needs to be grown and strengthened, i.e. from development to business solution architecture.

Entrepreneurship (startups, innovation labs, etc.) is insufficiently encouraged from cultural and governmental perspective, which hinders speeding up of innovation.

Culture:

Slovak culture is sometimes holding back, e.g. trust in yourself, underestimate yourself.

Being too shy in applying for positions that don't perfectly match the CV.

Being humble in presenting success stories.

Stephen Caulfield, Dell

Q1: What technology changes have the biggest transformative potential to drive business, entrepreneurship and policies within the next few years?

The rise of data being a company's most important asset after its people has transformed all companies into technology companies whether they realize it or not. Businesses that truly embrace this and look to leverage their data as a true differentiator in delivering business insights for the benefits of their customers are going to hold a big competitive advantage. The majority of successful start-ups are those that have figured this out in their respective industries. This comes with challenges in how to legislate this as we have seen with numerous EU rulings in relation to data and how companies are using it in recent years. Policies in relation to data and data privacy are lagging behind the pace of transformation on the technology side.

Blockchain is a specific technology that clearly has the potential to disrupt, particularly in the traditional financial services industry.

Q2: What is Slovakia's greatest strength and greatest weakness compared to other European countries when it comes to digital and innovative economy?

Slovakia's greatest strength continues to be its highly skilled workforce and competitive labor costs continue to be advantageous for Slovakia. A natural aptitude for analytics lends itself very well as a baseline to acquiring in depth data science skills which are much sought after in the digital and innovative economy. There needs to be more support from government for the startup community if Slovakia is to truly compete around innovation with other European countries, I feel it is beginning to lag behind in this area. Embracing digitalization in the public sector i.e. walking the walk, would certainly help in this respect.

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