Business platforms like Apple’s apps developer community and apps store are revolutionising how we scale business. The ability to reduce business friction by developing thousands of new business relationships through a web platform is a profound change.What technologies help us to do this and how do you design and deploy them? And which other technologies are companies turning to reduce friction in business?
It’s going to break many hearts around Europe where innovation clusters have been strongly advocated at all levels of policy making but a recent Norwegian study found that a firms international connections were far more important than local clusters. That means the future for many regions and companies lies in building those international pipelines (partnerships, ideas, possibilities) rather than relying on local cluster subsidies.
The rise of business platforms is changing the rules of competition almost unnoticed. Given a bad name from customer lock-in during the 1990′s the new generation of cloud based platforms are revolutionising business.
Look at an example like Nokia and you can see the mobile device and services giant rapidly evolving different types of ecosystems around its devices, services and solutions – these are all ad hoc innovation platforms or ways to introduce the unplanned into corporate strategy. Ad hoc innovation is extremely important but a poorly understood element of change. Yet companies have been evolving complex ad hoc innovation systems for perhaps the past three years.
During the 1980s it became apparent to European policy makers that the twin titans of innovation, at the time, the USA and Japan, were better at innovating than were European firms. Or rather Europeans could invent but struggled to get to market.
