The hero’s journey through the landscape of the future! - by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Tamara Samoylova & Duleesha Kulasooriya “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” - William Gibson The forces of the Big Shift are driving both fragmentation and consolidation, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationships among businesses. A new economic landscape is beginning to emerge. Lower barriers to market entry, commercialization and changing workforce dynamics are putting increasing performance pressure on large companies. Individuals are taking advantage of lowered barriers to become creators in their own right. In this new landscape, both large players and small will coexist and reinforce each other. A relatively few concentrated players will provide infrastructure, platforms, and services that support many fragmented, niche players. Fragmentation will affect some parts of the economy more than others, but it will be enduring rather than transitory. Some parts of the economy will be more affected by fragmentation than others, and more quickly, but the fragmentation will be enduring rather than transitory. In this new landscape, much of the world’s economic value will be created by the relationships among participants. Therefore, it is less useful to look at any one company than to consider the dynamics that will develop among the large and small players. This changing landscape will have implications for companies and individuals. Large companies will likely play one of three roles in this new landscape: infrastructure providers, aggregation platforms, or agent businesses. Today’s large companies will need to assess whether the market for their core products or services is susceptible to fragmentation and choose where to focus in the future. The actions they take today can help to position themselves for the role they choose to play in the future. For individuals and small entities, the new landscape offers opportunities to transform the pressures of today into profitable new ventures. - Pressures on companies: Macro trends impacting today’s businesses, performance implications, and common response strategies - Pressures on individuals: The decline of the “safety nets” commonly associated with full-time employment by an established company - Eroding barriers: Forces reducing barriers to entry, commercialization, and learning - Fragmentation: The emergence of many fragmented players focused on product and service development and commercialization in the sectors of the economy where barriers were reduced - Concentration: The emergence of infrastructure, platforms, and agent roles which provide scale and scope services to the fragmented players - Mobilizers: The emergence of players focused on orchestrating the ecosystem facilitates collaboration and learning - What companies can do: Winning strategies that companies can take today to position themselves successfully for the future Focusing around scale-and-scope roles will enable growth, as these areas will continue concentrating. This will require some shifts and repositioning, but companies can leverage assets they already have to shape the role they play. They may choose to: - Transform into infrastructure businesses, offering high-volume, routine processes previously used for their own products as an outsourced service - Become platform businesses, aggregating resources and vendors and connecting them with appropriate users or customers rather than acting as vendors themselves - Become agent businesses, channeling their sector experience and existing customer relationships to provide specific recommendations based on an understanding of each customer and his or her needs Whatever role they play, large companies will also have to connect and collaborate with mobilizers in order to unlock the collective knowledge of the ecosystem and become part of the transformation, rather than simply being impacted by it.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:57:15 +0000
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