The Next Generation of digital consumers are driving disruption in every industry. This revolution has both social and technological components as people rapidly adopt cheap consumer tech for work and play. Even non-digital businesses must react to these profound changes in consumer behavior as the next generation increasingly exert decision rights over every aspect of their lives. In this feature our experts reveal the scale of change and discuss new business strategies for the networked economy. The rules for success have changed. Strategic business plays are now much more important than old thinking about internal efficiencies and strategy execution.
Digital generation tearing industries apart
Graeme Codrington
Futurist, TomorrowToday
The digital generation are entering the workplace. In this TV show, futurist Graeme Codrington considers their impact.Digital Generation in every industry
In every industry in the world technology, the power of technology and this new generation of young people who use the technology in such different ways are gonna come into these industries and blow these industries apart. I really do believe that we're only just at the beginning of realising what this digital age will mean for us, and that's everything from the automotive industry to the pharmaceuticals from supply chains and logistics, to manufacturing to financial services and everything else in between. And so industries need at look at where technology is going to take them in the next few years.Connected Economy TV will continue to discuss the digital generation. We have more opinions from Graeme Codrington.
Differentiation via pursuit of Disruptive Tech Strategies
Dan Hushon
Chief Technology Officer, CSC
Disruption is very important to our customers. Most of our customers are sitting on what we call an innovation quotient, which is really looking at how much money they’re saving keeping [...]Beyond social media – the Age of Context
Robert Scoble
Tech Journalist
If you’re stuck in the past you’re going to lose, you only win by going into the future. I’ve been writing about social media, I’ve been a blogger for a long time. Shell Israel and I wrote about [...]The impact of consumerisation on IT strategy
Douglas Neal
Research Fellow, CSC's Leading Edge Forum
During our consumerisation work we have spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between the enterprise and its employees. We have been particularly concerned about the fact that these [...]Strategic plays now more important than strategy execution
Simon Wardley
Researcher, CSC's Leading Edge Forum
So when we talk about economic change there’s actually a standard process for how organisations evolve. So when we look at the commoditization of a pre-existing act, say electricity or [...]Disruptive innovation in a golden era of change
Dean van Leeuwen
Chief Intellectual Adventurer, TomorrowToday
Disruptive innovation puts static businesses at risk. It is important to make changes in the workplace to survive, as Dean Van Leeuwen discusses.Disruptive innovation can be great if businesses adapt.
We’re living in a golden era of change. Amazing technological innovations that are happening at the moment. We actually believe that the period that we are living during is going to have as big an impact as the industrial revolution. And you can look back every sort of 150, 200 years there’s inflection points where everything seems to change. The size of forces just come rushing in and they converge and they change and they transform the world dramatically. And we believe that we’re living during one of those times. I believe that historians will name the period that we are living in at the moment. And like that has important implications for business leaders. Because if that prediction is true, even if it’s just half true, then that means that you can’t go back to your workplaces and take last year’s strategy and add 10%. continue doing the same things over and over again. It means that you can’t go back and just do the same things that you’ve done over and over again just because they’ve worked in… in the past. And the surest way to fail in a world that is changing like this is just to continue doing the same things over and over again. Connected Economy TV will continue to discuss disruptive innovation in future TV Shows.Connected marketing in the digital economy
Bob Barker
Head of Corporate Development, Electric Dog
Connected marketing relies on well developed personal brands to share company content. Our latest video from Bob Barker explores the issue:
Connected marketing comes from individuals
A lot of companies out there have been using traditional marketing mechanisms.
They’ve been using digital marketing, and what we see is that more and more marketing has got to rely on the individuals in the company to help get the messages out because it’s those individuals that are often the sales people and it’s the individuals who themselves have got networks.
So what we do a lot of is helping people to understand what their personal brand is all about and to make sure, for example, on LinkedIn that they’ve got a decent profile because Google’s going to find you on LinkedIn if somebody’s looking for you quicker than any other platform, so you need to look the part.
You need to be dressed well, and so on and so forth. And then there’s the whole thing about network maintenance, or understanding and managing your network.
So we’ve all built up contacts on our Outlook or whatever it is, and we’re beginning to build up more and more contact on LinkedIn as it becomes more the de facto business platform for business people connecting.
So we have to put time in and understand how we build and nurture our networks using something like that.
And then the other thing is that now we’ve got a brand and we understand our network, we’ve then got all this content that the company’s produced that might be relevant to what we’re talking about but nobody’s sharing it.
So a lot of companies are building all this content and people aren’t sharing it, like these videos.
We see in large companies, when you look at the shares, nothing’s going on, and so we help companies to understand.
We help the individuals in those companies to understand it’s their responsibility to help get this content out there because on the internet when people are researching companies and they’re looking for what people, you know, what companies are all about, they’re doing a lot of their research without the company knowing.
So unless that company’s got content out there and people are interfacing and being out there, and having their brand out there, they’re not going to be visible when companies are looking for who they want to do business with and who they might trust.
The Connected Economy Channel will continue to explore connected marketing and the surrounding issues- look out for more TV shows from Bob Barker.
Digital ecosystem: Shaking up the traditional verticals
Julie Meyer
Founder, Entrepreneur Country
In this TV show Julie Meyers looks at the business economy as a digital ecosystem.
Digital ecosystem: Start ups, Corporates and Valuation
Well, I do think that in the way that we used to refer to verticals we’re going to be referring to ecosystems in the future. So, we used to refer to maybe healthcare as a vertical and now I think of digital health as an ecosystem.
I think it just means that these are multi-dimensional markets and that you can’t think of it in the same way.
And you have to look at how the digital enablers or start-ups are interacting with the corporates and the process whereby you value any business and the transactions that will get done, whether the funding’s or the acquisitions is going to take on that network shape.
We won’t just look at it and we won’t, I think, attribute so much value to the Goliaths’. I think there will be,you know, in that, those five phases of company growth, the companies that get acquired early for big amounts, like Skype in September 05, why does a company that’s in phase two going into phase three get acquired for 2.5 billion?
It’s because the strategic value to the acquirer was so high. Why does a company like Beat That Quote which had £250,000 of EBITDA get acquired by Google for 37.7 million?
It’s because the strategic value is disproportionately high compared to where they are in those five phases of company growth.
So, I just think there’s a set of structures which have become fairly normalised at this point whereby we will analyse what’s going on in the market. And I think that we’ll have to assess – we won’t look at markets in the same way, we have new tools to look at that. And those kind of David and Goliath model five phases of company growth, ecosystem economics, I think these are the ways. I mean, we’ve been looking at this for a very long time and we’re quite convinced now that our set of glasses kind of works. It doesn’t mean that we won’t, you know, explore and develop and understand better and make some mistakes, etc. We had the epiphanies, we looked for the exceptions, we found the patterns and we really do think we have the correct set of glasses. _________________________________________________________________________ Digital ecosystem is yet another way of looking at our world today. Hear more perspectives, ideas and analysis on Connected Economy TV.