By Mohit Agarwal

If you love to collect antiquated items as tokens of bygone eras, its about time that you took a trip to your favorite shopping mall and went on a buying spree. For, if early signs are any indication, we are witnessing the beginning of a revolution that will make the most hi-tech gizmo look like a latter-day jalopy. In this millennium, the devices that surround us shall be far more intelligent and responsive to the needs of individual users than they were in the previous century.

Thus, the watch on your wrist will double up as a paramedic that keeps a constant check on health parameters like pulse-rate, blood sugar, and cholesterol; maintain a detailed docket of these at a central server; and administer appropriate medication in case of an emergency. And a tiny global positioning device in your car will communicate with satellites to accurately determine your location anywhere on earth. This fusion-energy-powered car will be equipped with light-sensors and video-cameras to enable it to interpret road signs and adjust itself to variable lighting conditions. Surely, you would not want to take this beauty to the crowded mess of a city market? Why would you ever go to a market anyway! All your transactions will be carried out on the Net. Simple, isn't it?

Sounds unreal? But so did the idea of talking across continents before the telephones came around. The central theme of all research until now was to enable mortals do a particular task well. Today, in the New Millennium, it is to enable machines to do it even better. The primary focus of new-age technology will be to develop gadgets that can support a high level of automation, and can perform their tasks independent of erring humans. The requisite intelligence needed for this will, in turn, call for an increased level of aural and visual understanding of devices so that they can interact with their environment and react intelligently to it. Besides this, significant work will be directed towards connecting everything everywhere. Connectivity at this scale will provide mobile computing power right where it is needed the most.

The explosion in computing power backed by the tremendous curiosity of the human mind to know what is hidden within itself and in the vast expanse of the universe shall spur a tremendous growth in fields like genetic engineering and space research. Indeed, these fields will, probably, provide the inexhaustible sources of nutrition and energy that we have been searching for so long. On the other hand, research in waste-processing will also assume considerable significance as the millennial society will generate much more industrial and domestic waste than present disposal mechanisms can handle.

Research will make most of these things possible in this millennium. To cope with this, industry will have to evolve new business paradigms. A popular example of such evolution is the open-source-code concept that the Linux operating system has popularised in the infotech industry. Several other software companies have successfully emulated this by providing the source-code of the software free of cost, but charging for the customisation and other allied services that a particular consumer may desire. Such a thing was unthinkable in the recent past primarily because infotech firms saw their software as a final product and could not imagine giving it away. However, in the new paradigm, the software is only considered a medium through which other services can be rendered to the consumer and is, thus, offered at no cost in order to encourage the consumer to use it more freely.

The key here is to view technology as an enabler rather than an end-product. It is in this capacity that R&D and technology will have a positive impact on the profitability of several industries. For instance, technology will drive the penetration of e-commerce. This will mean a growth in business to business and business to customer commerce. De-materialisation will be a natural consequence of this, as faster information systems lead to reductions in inventories, physical assets, and paper transactions, leading to an increase in operating efficiency and profitability of a firm. Often, in traditional business models, intermediaries add no value, except to make it difficult for the customer to get the product. Dis-intermediation will, therefore, take place, and unless intermediaries add value, they are certain to have no role to play in the emerging business context.

In such a technology-enabled environment, the primary challenge will be the integration of technology within the present framework in a cost-effective manner. This integration would have to cater to the critical issues of organisational adaptation, survival, and competence. Essentially, this would embody the synergistic combination of the data-processing capacity of information technologies, efficient production mechanisms, and the creative and innovative capacity of the workforce of the company. This integration of technology in the production-cycle and the supply chain of the firm will have to be backed by considerable enhancement in the skills of the workforce. This integration will be an extremely expensive exercise for the company to undertake and a solution that pays rich dividends to one firm shall be ''an exercise of buying costly paperweights'' for another. It will, therefore, depend on the acumen of company leaders to decipher the mantra of effective utilisation in their own unique contexts.

The dramatic advances in information and technology are about to lead us to an economic transition from an era of competitive advantage based on information to one based on knowledge-creation, where human assets will be of paramount importance. In this new world of knowledge-based business, the mantra of success shall be to 're'-everything, and evolve, even as the technology does.

Mohit Agarwal is a third-year student of Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

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