Business & Industry Transformation, an opportunity for a new business practice

The world – including business, industry, markets, consumers, economies, and the demographic landscape – is changing at a rapid pace. Everything is changing due to globalization, free movement of capital and social factors. In the last decade, new economic powers have emerged, challenging established structures. New corporate giants have emerged too, taking over new market spaces. Industries have been transformed by disruptors’ business models (take the music industry for example). Today, your most important competitor may not even exist in your industry yet. There is massive competition between industries.
Think that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are less than 15 years old (Google recently celebrated its 15 years anniversary). The internet has radically changed our lives. It all started with fixed-network and dial-up services and the best is yet to come with mobile broadband networks in the era of the Networked Society.

The question is what’s next and how do we get there? Do we master the ongoing change process or are we just going with the flow? Are we going to reproduce the same economic concept of open-ended consumption or are we still able to change the course towards a model with more societal development that tackles fundamental social problems while still creating economic value.

By the end of this decade, we will be more than 8 billion humans on this planet. According to our recent Mobility Report, there are over 6.4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide today, with 130 million new net additions coming in the first quarter of 2013. The economic model we have today is not sustainable. We must start seriously redefining it!

Considering its broad impact on the business landscape and the resulting transformation of industry, the Networked Society represents a tremendous opportunity for a new business practice. It has never been so easy and so ‘cheap’ to start up a new business. Through the increasing number of connected devices, combined with high-performance mobile broadband infrastructure and cloud technology, a large amount of data is now available for processing. This information is helping to prevent disasters, fight poverty, and empower women in poor countries. The sky really is the limit for sustainable business innovations that generate profits for shareholders while at the same time creating significant value for society.

Thankfully, we are starting to see, here and there, initiatives that are driving change towards this mindset. Here are a few examples:

• The shared value initiative spearheaded by Harvard professor, Michael E. Porter.

• A number of institutions have started providing MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Both MIT and Harvard joined forces to launch the not-for-profit, edX, a free and open online platform. You can imagine the impact that this initiative would have on student communities in Africa. Students who historically couldn’t even afford to join an African school, suddenly can follow a curriculum at one of the most prestigious school on earth. And all of it for free! And all over a mobile broadband network.

• The Coca-Cola Company with partners, NGOs and companies, launched a water purification system housed within the community center to help provide communities in need with access to safe drinking water and other basic necessities. Through this commitment, they aim to deliver 500 million liters of safe drinking water, while promoting greater local development in communities that need it most.

• And finally, Ericsson has made the commitment to step up efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals. This is based on a strong belief that ICT can make this happen and is happening through a multitude of actions and collaborations. Here are just a few:

• Together with Refugees United, we have developed an application for mobile phones that help to find missing loved ones who have been separated by conflict or disaster – sometime for years.
• Another example is Ushahidi, a website that was developed using crowd sourcing to map reports of violence that occurred in 2008 in Kenya following the country’s 2007 elections.
• Active participation in UN Broadband commission with co-writing the report on Transformative Solutions for 2015 and beyond.

These examples are just a few of the reasons I truly believe that the Networked Society can be a driver of economic growth and societal development in this all communicating world.

This post has been published simultaneously on the Ericsson Networked Society Blog.