Geo-politics, manufacturing and data

There has been talk for years about the impact of geo-politics, specifically around US/China relations, however, now things seem to be escalating once again.  There is a very specific issue around semiconductor manufacturing within Taiwan, but for many US brands that manufacture their products or portions of their products in China, it appears that big changes are on the horizon.

In 2020, the pandemic caused a unique business disruption that many weren’t prepared for as supply chains were disrupted, alongside what for many was a demand increase like never before imagined.  Now on the other side of the wave, brands are not only seeing demand change, but a disruption of the fundamental product development cycle driven by geo-politics.

Companies that are able to navigate these storms successfully will separate brands that thrive long term, and ones that can quickly lose ground to competition.  We think that fundamentally this comes down to data.

There is the infamous story about how NASA lost the original moon landing information, and thus, the ability to get back to the moon. Although the underlying tech wasn’t lost, much of the specialized infrastructure and information used during the Apollo program were either retired or repurposed in favor of the low-orbit space shuttle program. Today’s development cost of the new SLS program to send humans to the moon has increased by orders of magnitude, as well as experienced numerous technical issues due to the lack of expertise and engineering power.

In manufacturing, product design and development has historically gone through a process that is siloed in nature from R&D to prototype, to full-scale production to understanding devices in the field.  If full-scale production data lives in a factory in China, can that data be tracked back to specific experiments in R&D, where is that data?  Just like with NASA, that historical trove of data is valuable, but typically gets lost in the flow of operations.  

The Lyceum was created to help companies answer questions around this information. Behind every brand is a complex set of data that follows a product from R&D, to prototype to production, into the field, and post-mortem.  Having this data centralized, organized, and easily shared amongst relevant internal and key external parties is an important foundation supporting the uniqueness of the brand and the product quality moving forward.  The Lyceum was built with this concept in mind of organizing data of all dimensions from seed to grave.  Our initial focus has been in the audio sector as there is over a decade of expertise in R&D, running experiments, collecting data, cleaning it, post-processing it; understanding audio data and measurement at its very core.

We believe the successful manufacturing brands of the future will use their own data as a fulcrum in streamlining the NPI process, creating a nimbleness in this complex process. The current geo-political tensions may be just that push, as commodity prices, manufacturing partners and their location, as well as the supply chain take center stage.