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.
01
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.
02
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 [...]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 the lights on, versus how much money they're actually investing in doing things that create value for their customers. And allow them to differentiate themselves in the industry. And as a result, we have a very interesting proposition to be given our existing our existing physical plant that we own in customers and our relationships. We know them, maybe even better than they know themselves. We manage their systems, we manage their applications and operations. What we pick up the opportunity to do is to help them to understand which of those applications that are in their plant are actually strategic, which ones are less strategic, and how we actually begin to take the ones that truly are strategic, modernise them to new platforms and new cost models that allow us to actually free up working capital to allow us to then invest forward in these very disruptive applications, that allow us to go after the third platform technologies. Things like social, mobile, analytics, and certainly doing everything on cloud.
03
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 [...]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 eight years ago called ‘Naked Conversations’ which was all about how social software and blogging was gonna change the corporation, and it absolutely has. Now Sales Force calls themselves the social enterprise and has social tools built into their customer relationship management systems.
Since that book you know how many billion dollar companies have popped up? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Cora, well, Cora’s not a billion dollar one but Four Square and Cora and a whole bunch of other ones that are popping up that just use social.
And this new book is about five things, so social is one of them, but location data, because our world is getting mapped and it’s getting sharper and sharper in the databases, we’re getting a lot more data every day about the world we’re walking through and being part of. Add-ons, sensors, my Nest thermostat now has a sensor, when I walk by the thermostat it understands I’m there, right.
And my Google Glass has, I don’t know, five sensors on it and my mobile phone has seven sensors on it and my Oakley ski goggle has four sensors, and on and on. And wearable computers are going to really change what’s possible with mobile, ‘cause like this Google Glass is the first consumer electronics gadget that knows where I’m aimed, it’s firing the sensors right now as I’m moving around. And where my eyes are looking, and it’s listening to me, you know, and it’s talking to me once in a while.
So that changes, if you wrap those five things together and add in big data and machine learning, you can make a new kind of software, you can make an operating system that is contextual, that knows whether you’re walking, running, skiing, driving, shopping, in a meeting, in an interview, right, in a sales presentation, you know.
And the world should serve you differently if you’re in different contexts, you know. Right now I’m in an interview so don’t talk to me about shopping, you know, but if we walk out and start walking around and going to different stores then I’ll say ‘hey, help me shop better’, right, and go into a shopping mode and start serving me better.
04
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 [...]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 employees now are much smarter about technology, they own much of the kit, and in fact they have access to a rich source of service on the web. But when you at an employee and turn them sideways you realise every employee is also a customer. In fact what companies now have to contend with is, now the customers now more about technology, own much of the kit and have access to resources. That is a different kettle of fish because if it’s only about employees and bring your own device, then it’s really an issue of something that IT has to worry about. With occasional anxiety from the board. But its customers, and customers are a concern to everyone form the CEO down and up. So we see a big change in that customers are now being affected by this and that’s why we are embarking on our project with Professor Venkat Ramaswamy around co-creation, were we see people actually working together to create the experience of employees and of customers rather than the company simply producing a product and then the customer having only one choice, which is to buy or not buy. So going forward we see companies having to work with many other third parties to actually make things work for the customer, and that’s going to be called co-creation, and that’s going to be a big change.
05
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 [...]
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 compute you often get new practices emerge and then those new organisations form around those new practices and they dominant. So the electricity age we got forwardism, the mechanical age we got the American system, internet age we got Web 2.0. Cloud we’re getting basically a new generation of companies. Now we often have these sorts of debates about whether strategy matters. I mean Jamie Dimon once said that you know execution is the key to a strategy success. Well it turns out that this next generation of organisations appearing with Cloud have slightly different ways of playing at the strategic game. They have very high levels of what you would call situational awareness. And I did a piece of work a couple of years back. Back in 2011 which mapped the phenotype, the characteristics of these next generation companies. And then in 2012 we looked at the level of strategic play against that action in this case it was the use of open to manipulate markets. And what we found was strategic play was critical, more important than execution. So players are a particular group of companies who tend to have extremely high levels of strategic play and they tend to act on it. So they do things like use open as a way of manipulating markets and those companies have had massive market growth over the last 7 years. Now there is another group of companies called chancers which tend to have low levels of strategic play and don’t tend to act very effectively. For example don’t use open as a way of manipulating markets and they have tended to show very negative market cap or stagnation over the last 7 years. So players are a particular type of new form of organisation which have very high levels of strategic play and that turns out to be critical for completion.
06
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.
07
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.
08
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.
09
Machine Intelligence in The Second Machine Age
