Reflecting on a rapidly changing business world.
The issue we must tackle today, is how we go about adapting to the changing world? One that will be able to take all the advantages of the changes all businesses are undergoing, how societies will be adjusting and responding. We are facing a time of unprecedented economic and social crisis but this is a time equally for seizing and sizing different opportunities.
We clearly need to find ways to navigate ourselves back into some (new) order; to stabilize the chaos we are in. What we first need to do is make sense of what is going on around us, we need to determine what actions to take and the level of action, resource and support each part needs. We are in a period of (great) change. How are we thinking about how to adjust, not just to the immediate challenges but the greater ones that are certainly heading our way.
Within business, the present crisis is offering a chance to make significant changes to how we operate in the future. I am not sure many of you feel the same, it seems disruption is in everything, in what we need to undertake, in what is coming towards us in change. We are challenged but we have ample signals to amplify and explore.
Disruption actually has a common purpose, often far less sinister than promoted or we suspect, it requires us to re-equip and open up, as we learn to deal in this changing world where connections can emerge from anywhere at any time, offering a new ‘line of sight’ onto an existing problem to begin to break down the barriers and find new fresh ways forward.
These will be through different approaches to designing and extracting the potential value gained and these, in my opinion, will form around ecosystems and their management, through technology solutions provided by platform providers.
We need to respond quickly and in very different, highly collaborative ways. Digital offers unique, new ways to address many of our challenges everywhere. Our need is to explore and exploit, and we have to harness ourseleces, our organizations, through these new technologies and collaborative concepts to take advantage and leverage all that is possible.
We need to engage in different ecosystems and participate in new platform learning to take advantage of the changes taking place all around us. To quote Chuck Robbins, the Cisco CEO and Chairman “We believe that no one company can deliver the full breadth of technology solutions that customers need at the pace the market requires”. It is through the increasing intensity of using data and a deep analysis where this growing need for broader collaborations becomes so essential.
Technology, innovation and digitalization are the combination effect that will move us forward in our changing business world. We can’t operate in isolation, we need to be far more highly collaborative.
Partnerships abound, not just within a specific industry but in cross-industry collaborations. Ecosystems need to form to take advantage of many rapidly emerging market opportunities. It is not just welcome to a world of ecosystems, it is learning to change from being exclusive owners into open collaborators, that build ‘greater value’ from the common need of working together, and many of these are increasingly cross-industry ecosystems.
Just recognize the changes we are undertaking in cross-industry collaborations are significant
If we recognize what it takes to build new transportation business models, it needs an ecosystem of public authorities, automakers, component suppliers, software providers and infrastructure builders to come together to make this happen
The travel industry will emerge far differently in the months ahead, in its post-recovery from the ravages of Corvid-19. Within airports, train stations we are seeing a conscious integrating of all that makes up this travel hub, including connecting traffic updates, weather conditions, arrival and departures, airport shops, restaurants, hotels, parking terminals and flight or train understanding and on-line bookings. This will be rapidly advanced, integrated and providing a very different business model proposition.
Many of the changes that will emerge in the next twelve to twenty-four months will become more cross-industry and service ecosystems. The search is for synergies. It requires a host (platform provider), different apps, weblinks and consistent ways to integrate these so those using the airport or train station can navigate their way around their personal needs. It needs an ecosystem and platform management to bring this together.
We are increasingly expecting as consumers, uninterrupted connectivity, and virtual integration and that need for continued connectivitity will spur new value propositions for trechnology and AI to take over and manage more of your daily, repeative tasks . It is this constantly connecting-up that is constantly layering mini-ecosystems onto each other so experiences improve as these ecosystems connect and work out what is needed to be delivered.
If we look around we are seeing increasingly the cross-industry ecosystem exploding.
We have new ecosystems that are building new value in offering mobile commerce, building digital into all that we undertake increasingly in retail, banking, and entertainment. We are seeing new energy solutions emerge in Agriculture, Energy, Utilities. We are seeing a ‘connected difference’ in the Automotive, Driving, linking to Postal services, electronic transfers, blockchain transactions, purchasing across most of our goods, both personal and in business and exploring concepts in Health solutions that require cross-industry collaborations.
We see electronic capital trading getting faster and faster by the application of data flows, analytics and software that automates the trading decision. We are connecting into Public Services to gain insight and seek new value. Manufacturing is connecting up through its Industry 4.0 drive. We have Artificial Intelligence increasingly working, either in the background or foreground for decision-making. We are building platforms and connecting up the individual ecosystems of (internal) knowledge into these new creators of value, based on collaboration, mutually shared interest and vision and in the co-operation that emerges around the extensive use of platforms and technology application.
The smartphone is to date, our greatest ecosystem, and platform, as individuals as it is all wrapped up into one personalized connected ecosystem and the phone is the platform. It is rapidly becoming the source of information, value generator and our personalized “dual world” as it learns what we need and is increasingly responding to mirror our world.
Just image the ecosystem of connectors we require within our daily lives, living in “smart” cities.
The opportunity to connect the providers of ‘hard’ services (energy, equipment, construction, utilities, etc) with our ‘soft’ needs (where to go, what we can do, order, where to park, what to do and see) requires huge collaborative efforts but the reward has significant benefits. Smart cities attract ‘smart’ people that attract ‘smart’ institutions and eventually ‘smarter’ business entities.
The connecting brainpower allows everything to manage their own personal speed of things, a flow that can potentially reduce redundancy and enhance engagement. The connections begin to reshape everything through the data; communications, public services, responses to crisis and opportunity, being aware. The smarter in the use gets increasingly channelled, as this increasing flow of data to analyze, target and coordinate life in the city, can allow for a better way for all to connect to that city and personally identify. It changes urban life as it involves citizens increasingly in shaping the future.A connected city.
This is a very different potential in the new business models for all involved. The period ahead is going to be hugh “reset” within ourselves, within the way we go about and organize work. A world built on increasing collaboration, cross-industry cooperations that has technology, digitalization and innovation at its core.