Part 1 and Part 2 outlined what, and how, core innovative technologies are creating business disruption, and provided some examples of new business models that illustrate these core principles. Part 3 endeavours to offer insights into common principles for successful re-invention of business models in the emerging de-centralized Digital Economy, starting from the following closing statement of Part 2.
Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)
There are many revenue rich products, and markets, being created currently, what they have in common is that they are real innovations with a comprehensive and cohesive approach to an emerging recognisable issue; what is being offered, to whom, and how they operate are all innovatively addressed. None of them are merely offering the existing product from an existing market place with availability online, the old definition of multi Channel operations in a Digital Business environment!
So what if anything can be pin pointed as under pining successful markets and competitive products?
There are many complex multi part answers to this question, but if you want to take the big picture as to what has enabled many of the new business capabilities the answer lies in data. This is not Data types, uses, or tools familiar to current Enterprise IT systems and Business reporting, rather it’s the ability to tap into, use and respond quicker than competitors to the flow of data across everything that could be relevant, contextual and contemporary. New markets such as AirBnB exist because data can be aggregated and stored on a previously undreamt massive scale at very low cost. But cheap storage data aggregation is not the only possible answer to the competitive use of data.
A more complex answer to how a successful business model uses data in a different manner is the rapid, disruptive growth of an alternative business model for second hand car buying and selling. In the UK WeBuyAnyCar.com has fundamentally altered the entire sales process for selling a used car in some two years.
The prospective seller enters the Registration Number of their car which is instantly checked against the UK Government registration data base to establish make, model etc. to which the seller adds further details on mileage, condition, etc. when prompted. Instantly a cash purchase price is offered valid for one week with the proviso that on delivery to a WeBuyAnyCar.com physical collection point the car should be as declared. WeBuyAnyCar.com calculates the price to offer by real time continuous analysis of car auctions prices realized by cars of the same make and model.
This example combines the necessary government required documentation to register a sale, with both reference data to establish the details of the car for sale, and real time data to establish its current realisable value hour by hour in the market place. Unsurprisingly even existing trade buyers now use the values produced by WeBuyAnyCar.com in place of subscribing to a monthly paper trade guide, as such WeBuyAnyCar.com could be said to have created and gained control over pricing and the new market for car trading.
Today the Web and Apps have created increasing equality between the knowledge of a buyer and seller, so for competitive advantage the Enterprise has to equip its Knowledge Workers with not just more data, but better analytics of a real time nature unavailable to the buyer, or their competitors, to win the battle of Knowledge Buyer versus Knowledge Worker!
In summary; decentralization is both the creation of technology enablers, and the manifestation of the desire of individuals to organize outcomes from smaller elements that suit their preferences. This directly attacks current market leaders existing combinations of products and services delivered from an enterprise constructed for optimization of their delivery. The resulting business drivers from this disruption remove the inbuilt advantages of established market leaders with their resource ownership. However the disruption is proving to offer increasingly large scope for new markets and products using innovative business models.
Research report now available: The Foundational Elements for the Internet of Things (IoT)
Footnotes
- The next blog in this series will examine the development within the Technology Industry of Fog, or Cloud Edge, Computing as the basic architectural model for decentralized technology devices and services as opposed to the role of Cloud Computing for centralized functions.
- In judging the awards for the 2015 Constellation Research Connected Enterprise annual Super Nova competition it was extremely noticeable that new hardly known startups dominated the entries submitted by their satisfied customers. In each case the change achieved could truly be described as both innovative and disruptive, whilst the outcomes for the enterprise and its business were remarkable and substantial. See Constellation Connected Enterprise for more details on awards.
