Building a great digital business
06/12/2020 16:57
What types of businesses are you seeing emerge out of this crisis?
If you look back over the last century, we saw some of the world’s most successful businesses form during moments of crisis. For example, during the financial crisis, some fundamental assumptions were questioned. Do we need to own houses? Do we need to own cars? Out of that came the gig economy, Uber, Airbnb. The question now is, how do incumbents use this crisis as a catalyst to drive forward some innovations and redefine what the new normal is before it defines them?
We see six archetypes of businesses likely to emerge in the post-COVID-19 era (exhibit). The first one is the remote services provider, such as companies offering medical consultations and online education. It may be the easiest step forward from a business-building standpoint because it accelerates some trends that were already taking place. Before, when real estate agents offered virtual tours, they probably did not see much uptake. Now they are taking the same capability and expanding it. We could see other new services such as equipment maintenance: being able to repair a washing machine without having someone physically come to your home.
Another archetype is the collaboration platform. Everyone has heard of Zoom and Webex, but we can see extensions such as training platforms. The third piece is the dynamic talent deployer, which takes the gig economy to a new level. We already see creative moves like the grocery business offering short-term work to employees laid off from the airline industry.
The fourth one is the resilient and flexible operator. This has to do with building in new data sets and capabilities into supply chains to not only make them more resilient to shocks but enable them to flex with demand rapidly. The fifth type of business is the idle data utilizer. Companies have looked at ways to leverage their data, particularly in the business-to-consumer context. Now, even in the B2B context, companies are being forced to find ways to turbocharge their operations using data. The final archetype is the high-touch digital retailer. How do we create curated experiences in retail without the physical element? This could be related to food kits or the real estate tours I mentioned, for example.