Versatile Amphibian

As 2015 winds to a close I've been reflecting on what I've learned this year. For succinctness, I'll keep this post just to 'learned about the Digital Economy'. Enjoy, and thanks for reading in 2015! This is taking ages... I've been amazed by the slow pace of change to digital economy cultures amongst organisations in all sectors. Having been thinking about this for years I take for granted that ideas like Lean Startup are the norm in management, but it seems not. I realise that I've been unrealistic. These kinds of massive changes take decades and I suspect I'll be advising on this phase for much of the next ten years of my career. The fundamental lessons are the same in every industry. This year, my team and I have worked in a huge range of industries, from government departments to construction machinery, snake bites to sportswear, groceries to car manufacturer, appliances to social media, and in most cases we've come in as generalists. And t...

One of the techniques we've been playing with this year is The Digital Nightmare Competitor, a framework for stretching the thinking of executives in a business by showing them how their industry could look strategically, operationally and economically in a digital world. I recently did such an exercise for a studio client and thought I'd share a nightmare I particularly like. Think of it as a Grinch-like Christmas present :)... November 5th  2026, London In late trading, shares in Wintermute , the apex media business of the 2020's hit a record high, valuing the business at more than $400Bn. This success marks a remarkable rise to prominence for an organisation barely a decade old. Classical disruption started with the customer From its launch in late 2016, Project Wintermute targeted people turned off by the complex media distribution and rights landscape of the mid-2010’s. By offering a single monthly subscription to unlimited premium digital conten...

As promised in a previous post about information symmetry , I’ve now completed my first-draft framework for assessing the success of digital economies.  Digital education was quite a tough ask as it’s a broad ranging subject. I think it condenses into three topics, though: Higher education , because we’re in an age of discovery and people need to be both intellectually inquisitive and able to learn. My view is that a properly thought out higher education system which emphasises self-study is fundamental to the success of nations. I have major issues with the idea that those who wish to learn should have to pay for that learning excessively as it encourages competition based on perceived rather than real outcomes (why go to a college where it’s harder to get a good grade?)… but I accept that I’m a throwback in this regard and that commercial undergraduate education is here to stay. I don’t care about what subjects are being studied either – it’s simplistic to suggest...

For narcissistic reasons I recently looked back on the most popular posts from 5 years of blogging and discovered that amongst the top 3 was this one on the relative sizes and evolution of social networks. Back in 2012 I was trying to make a point about the decline and slight return of MySpace. Looking around has made me realise that consolidated views of active users in this market are actually quite thin on the ground. So here's my read on the performance of key social networks from 2006 to 2015. Although no one has matched the breakout performance of Facebook in 2007, there are murmurs of hockey sticks from Snapchat and Instagram. Poor old Twitter failed to kick on from 2012, despite looking a bit sticky. Too slow to become a photo stream and too transient to be a publisher, Twitter has struggled a bit for direction in the intervening three years, scoring successes only through Vine. I hope this brief recap is useful. Rest assured that I remain vigilant for hints of canine...

In previous posts I've written about presentations on the trajectories of digital economies in Africa and Norway . Both of these were based on an unfinished framework I've been developing that tries to describe the success factors for national economies in the Early Digital Economy. I won't recap this framework in detail as its described in the posts linked above, but at the highest level it breaks the success factors into four categories: Pervasive access to computing Information symmetry Innovative AND entrepreneurial culture Digital skills and education In order to complete the framework and starting building a broader data set to test it I've now populated one of the two missing sections, information symmetry . This topic breaks into 4: Unfiltered access to information, enabling people to have open conversations and access (if not a preference for) content from every potential point of view. This is vital for true innovation as a fear of repercussions ...

I'm on my way back from Oslo, where I presented a keynote on the Digital Economy at the DND IT-lederkonferansen 2015 conference. Rather than do a standard Eight Traits presentation I decided to build on the work on success factors for digital economies that I prepared for SATNAC last month. You can find the presentation here . The structure of my argument was as follows: Norway was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Economy. Before 1770 GDP per capita was on the same level as Mexico or Portugal; now it is more than twice that of the latter and three times the former. (I had to show 2003 numbers on the chart as doing 2015 made it look crazy!) But now the system is changing away from automation of physical processes into automation of mental ones. This will cause great disruption as it will polarise the productivity and hence the success of companies and countries. So how well set up is Norway? Success for digital economies is driven by four main factors: ac...

About 10 days ago my team and I published an analysis of the creative challenges for UK TV. Our concerns were that the creative basis of our TV economy was being damaged, despite an environment of increasing revenues, driven by TV's role in reinforcing the telecoms market through triple and quad-play bundling. What we found was troubling. Although revenues are indeed up by 10% since 2012, our share of global TV revenues has fallen and that the entire of the revenue increase can be accounted for by sports rights. As we showed in our 2013 Royal Television Society report , sports rights spending flows straight through the industry into the rights bodies, clubs and players, rather than into new skills, ideas and creative formats. And the worst is yet to come: the new Champions League and Premier League rights deals add more than a billion pounds a year onto the rights budget, so unless revenues increase new funding sources will be required if net spending on new creative content is t...