The pandemic. Climate change. Economic inequity. Today, our biggest societal issues are systemic. And with cause and effect so globally interwoven, the solutions have to be collective, too. The hoarding of information and resources only hinders innovation, slows resolution, and erodes trust.
Our commercial challenges are also systemic. External forces have a much bigger impact than they used to, and supply chains have been fundamentally disrupted. Digital giants like Google and Amazon have built massive networks of data collection which they’re using to dominate, replacing entire markets with a few powerful supply chains that cut across industries.1 At the same time, digital startups are disrupting from underneath, though they struggle to reach scale.
To stay competitive, there is a growing imperative for tighter integration with stakeholders. As a result, corporate venture capital (CVC) is on the rise2 : Established companies are investing in their own startups, tapping into their flow of innovation while keeping them flush with resources.
In this environment, digital transformation isn’t enough: You need digital innovation, where data is the product or service.
Accordingly, last year's digital switch has unlocked a lot of possibilities. Software is hot; data and analytics are hottest. But while software is infinitely scalable, talent is finite. A recent IDC survey revealed that in much of the world (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), “finding talented and skilled employees” is the most significant obstacle to achieving business goals.3 That means you no longer have the luxury to innovate only inside your organization. You need to innovate outside of it, too – in collaboration with your partners and ecosystem.
IT SPENDING IS UP. WAY UP.
1 https://www.raywang.org/books/everybody-wants-rule-world-surviving-and-thriving-world-digital-giants . 2 https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/entrepreneurial-private-business/small-business-solutions/blogs/golden-age-of-corporate-venture-capital-is-yet-to-come.html
3 IDC, Big Data and Analytics in Europe, Post-Pandemic: User Views, https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=EUR146615021, Doc #EUR146615021, June 2021. 4 The Gartner IT Spending Forecast, 2Q21 Update: Build Budgets Taking Off,” drawing on Gartner’s 2021 CIO Survey, Question S1Q3, https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/4002041/the-gartner-it-spending-forecast-2q21-update-build-budgets-takin
In today’s business landscape, longstanding boundaries are blurring. A competitor can become a partner, a partner can become a customer, and a customer can become a competitor. The solution is not to wall off but to lean in to a new form of competitive edge: generative relationships with mutually beneficial outcomes.
Advantage is shifting to data becoming the product and service, and you can’t go it alone.
Your only option is to become more “interwoven,” creating a trusted ecosystem built on clear rules of engagement. This will generate joint data, insights, and innovation that wouldn’t be possible independently. Together with your collaborators, you can weave a strong and resilient “rope,” or value chain, and take a leadership position. This approach has advantages even against the giants in your space.
And there’s more good news: It’s much easier to become interwoven than it used to be. The API economy has changed everything, making the build-or-buy decision much less relevant.
Now that it’s easy to make all the component parts talk to each other, your task is to assemble, orchestrate, and interweave data, intelligence, processes, and people. Trust and agility are the requirements, the mutually generated data and insights are the currency, and successful outcomes are the reward.
We saw it happen on the world stage with the development of COVID vaccines, when pharmaceutical companies partnered with academic institutions to accelerate development. We saw it when individual investors banded together to topple the hedge funds in their shorting of GameStop. And we see it in open source intelligence communities,5 where academics, activists, journalists, and data scientists are collaborating for the greater good.
This interwoven approach is the catalyst for accelerated digital innovation – and it’s your way forward in an interconnected world.
5 https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/08/07/open-source-intelligence-challenges-state-monopolies-on-information?itm_source=parsely-api
