Versatile Amphibian

As I mentioned in a previous post , I presented at this year's Health 2.0. I also stayed for a number of sessions on digital and innovation. As a relative newcomer to this industry it was enlightening to hear the common themes coming through in presentations from the big pharma companies, so I thought I'd share my main takeaways. The strategic direction of the industry can seemingly be summed up in the phrase "beyond the pill", which is a composite of two big ideas: Digital-only treatments that address the root cause of health problems, which are often bio-psycho-social. Lifestyle, not disease is killing people, so it may be possible to create highly addictive, game-like experiences that change lifestyles and therefore beat the statistics. Treatment ecosystems that reflect the fact that people's problems are often blends of ailments that cannot be effectively treated by a single drug provider or physician. Doing this for real suggests some kind of aggregato...

I was lucky enough to be asked to present at the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week on the topic of digital innovation in the pharma industry. This might surprise some of you (given that three years ago I'd hardly every worked outside tech and media), but we've actually been doing some cool projects in the industry.  I thought you might be interested in the topic since pharma is yet another industry impacted by the Digital Economy, but one with some idiosyncrasies created by the hellishly long and expensive product development process and the role of regulators. If they're going to change from pills to outcomes some fairly major things will have to change and I like to think we're helping a little. As ever, I talked a little about the reasons why digital innovation fails: Failure to validate demand Failure to iterate Failure to track and measure (particularly since the root cause of positive outcomes is hard to figure out) Failure to structure e...

It's been a while since I've posted. Work is the reason for this: there is lots of it! My assumption as to why this is is that many more organisations are feeling the impact of the broad spectrum disruption that's coming down the line from increasingly established Digital Economy businesses. Great for me, troubling for my clients...  The disruption is characterised by: Unequal competition between relatively local, focused, traditional organisations and global, digital-first conglomerates A rapid move to consumer-centricity from product-centricity as the predominant business model Uncertainty about how to achieve rapid change from a standing start or even where to begin with a programme of strategic change I'm coming to believe that mobile telecoms carriers are likely to be the next to suffer reimagination of their industry. Open infrastructure projects, network virtualisation and over-the-top services, combined with zealous regulators suggest that is now...

As you know, I spend an excessive amount of time trying to describe how Digital Economy businesses are different from Industrial Economy ones. A structure I've tried out recently is the one shown in the picture below, which is intended for a TV/ filmed entertainment company. The idea is that the business can be abstracted into three layers: A Presentation Layer, that enables their products/ service/ content to be accessed/ used/ consumed; A Monetisation Layer that enables assets to be... well, monetised through the presentation layer; and An Asset Layer that describes the explicit and implicit assets of the business On the left side of the diagram are the traditional controlled and ordered layers of the Industrial Economy. On the right is the often unknown and anarchic world of the Digital. I think it's quite fun to play with, which you do by picking one square on the left and imagining how the squares on the right would change how your business operates and comp...

While I'm always cautious about announcing goals in advance of their completion ( because it makes them less likely to be achieved ), I've got a really exciting research agenda on the cards in 2016 and I therefore thought I'd share it to get some advance ideas and insights. So without further ado, here's the three Rumsfeldian 'known-knowns' for 2016. Eight Traits of a Digital Business - perhaps no surprise because I've talked about it a lot during 2015, my first business book, on the characteristics of successful (and unsuccessful) organisations in the Digital Economy is out in February. I'm super-excited about it as the response so far has been positive and I've finally finished editing several hundred references! More on this closer to the time... Productivity Benefits of Digital Cultures - a one year study I've been doing with Julian Birkinshaw at the London Business School, along with a number of colleagues. I think we've finall...

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...

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...

On Monday I was privileged enough to present a keynote at the SATNAC conference in South Africa, the slides for which can be found here . The presentation is a little less conceptual than my usual... in that there are significantly fewer pictures of cats off the internet. The thrust of my argument was as follows: Part 1 - setup We are in the early throes of a shift to a new economic system This means redefinition of the roles of individuals in society, businesses and governments in their lives Conceptually, some commentators believe that this new system will enable African countries to leapfrog over their developed world counterparts because they don't have the infrastructure, business model and cultural encumbrances of the Industrial Economy To examine whether that is true, we need to look at the ingredients for success at a macro (national or perhaps mega-corp level), which I'd describe as: Pervasive access to computing (because this is the general purpose technolo...

I'm using the lull between Christmas and New Year to gather my thoughts from 2014. It's been a crazy year: it feels like digital has finally hit the boardroom agenda in a more fundamental way than a technology or marketing investment. 'Early adopter' leaders understand that there are radical productivity and competitive advantages to adopting a digital culture and are thinking how to create one. That's not to say that I haven't seen a large number of executives and boards who want to brand a vanilla technology or go-to-market tweak as a radical digital initiative. It may surprise you to know that I have no issue with the latter approach to growth - I'm not a zealot and frankly many organisations do not yet face an existential crisis caused by the digital economy. Still more simply don't have the operating platform (capital, cultural, technological) in place to make any sort of radical change. The trouble is that if you brand something as a fundamental ...

I finished reading Dave Eggers' novel The Circle the other day (aside: it's not bad, although nowhere near as close to the bone as some observers would have you believe). I was reminded of one of the central ideas to the novel in a chat with a colleague and that sparked a thought: if we can measure (and gameify) our fitness digitally in real time, could we do the same with our work? Or, in less management consulting language - is there a Fitbit for workers? In The Circle, employees of the eponymous firm are ranked on their participation in a range of internal and external communications. Their influence in the firm and the digital world is measured in real time as a proxy for their success in the social media firm. In the book, the score is a fairly simple numerical rank made up of a few key underlying metrics ('smiles', referred sales...). The key part that I like about the PartiRank idea though is that the employee takes personal control of their score. Most o...

I’m in the process of developing some predictions for what will happen in digital in 2014 and thought that I’d post them here to get some wisdom from my readers! Some of these will be positive, some might be busting some myths about categories that have captured the zeitgeist. Now, more than ever, comments will be greatly appreciated.   Last time out, I wrote about the evolution of the digital camera market in 2014. On a somewhat different tack, here’s some thoughts about how a growing need to take a holistic perspective on digital will lead to large organisations moving into Shoreditch this year. My prediction By the end of the year, more than a quarter of companies on the FTSE 100 will have started or announced a dedicated digital team, based in or around Shoreditch. The digital journey Most large organisations have been on a 10 to 15 year journey with digital. This journey started out in the late 1990s, when businesses started having websites for marketing and t...

I’m presenting at WAN IFRA in Berlin tomorrow, which meant that I had a little time to listen in to some of the presentations going on around the event. Since it’s fair to say the news industry is still experimenting with digital, I thought some case studies might be interesting. I was particularly taken with the work of Espen Egil, from VG Norway, a newspaper group that’s been very innovative in its use of new digital formats. A few examples: One. The fire truck scandal A Norwegian district was campaigning to get a new fire truck as there’s was very old. VG turned this into a social campaign in which people submitted photos of their old fire trucks. VG put them onto an interactive map so that readers could compare different districts. 40% of districts had a profile in the first week and, of course, the fire departments started posting pictures of their shiny new trucks, so both ends of the spectrum were covered. Link: http://www.vg.no/spesial/2012/brannbiler/ Two. Kind...