Yesterday, I wrote about how we can better anticipate the future. In this blog, I am providing a process for it.
An arrow is propelled forward by pulling the string of the bow backward. The same is about predicting the future. A peek at the past reveals the trend for the future. History repeats itself. Every change follows a pattern, and that pattern recurs.
Departmental Stores disrupted the Neighborhood Retailers. The Departmental Stores faded off in a competition with the Malls. The Malls are now being challenged by the Etailers. It was possible because of the evolution of many enabling things like improvement in railway and road networks, Optic Fiber Networks, Internet, Telecommunication, etc.
The same story repeats for Kodak's Photograph Printing Business. The Rolls and Cameras were disrupted by Mobile Phones, Printers, Cloud Storage, Internet, Telecommunication, etc.
In all these progressions, newer connections emerged and better connected the community to commerce.
Do we see a pattern? In both these and many such examples, the following steps repeat:
An Invention is made (example - A Digital Camera).
A few Innovators try it (Each of us at some time bought a Kodak/Nikon Digital Camera)
Enabling Technologies Develop (Mobiles with Camera, Cloud Storage, Faster Internet, Social Media Platforms)
The Enabling Technologies reached a point of inflection.
Business Models emerge (Somebody replaced the Camera with a Mobile Phone, Somebody replaced an Album with a Social Media Site)
Businesses Grow and eventually Consolidate.
Competition intensifies, and finally, only a few big players stay in the market.
We can use this roadmap and look at the stage of our industry at this moment. We can then predict where it would move next. In the past, the transition from one phase to another took decades. The pace of change has intensified, and we can now be very aggressive in predicting the timelines (it could be a couple of years or less).
Also, resources are no longer scarce. All the business models in the past were based on scarcity. For example, we have limited seats in a University. The entire admission process is focused on admitting a few. With the advent of the Internet, the same programs are available on MOOCs at a fraction of the cost. There is practically no limit on the number of candidates who can enroll. Abundance is the new keyword. We need to correct the past business models with this insight. Practically, the Price/Performance Ratio for every value proposition will reduce exponentially.
So, what's next in your Business?
Subodh
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