The digital revolution is already transforming many aspects of business and even whole industries. Just as the steam engine and electrification revolutionized entire sectors of the economy from the 18th century onward, modern technologies are beginning to dramatically alter today’s industries. Previous industrial revolutions have had huge societal impacts, supporting an explosion in the world’s population over the past 200 years.
The global population has doubled in the past 50 years and is forecast to grow to 11 billion by the end of the century. It took until 1804 for the global population to reach 1 billion. The most recent addition of 1 billion people took just 12 years. To keep up with increasing demand, technology has had to accelerate. It has been frequently observed that improvements in computing power have largely kept pace with Moore’s Law.
After four decades of exponential increases, the world is now doubling an immense amount of processing power in every two-year period, which is leading to astonishing leaps forward in technological capabilities.
As technology becomes ubiquitous and accessible to the wider population, it is having a profound impact on how customers behave and the expectations they have. Customers across the B2C and B2B worlds are developing an insatiable demand for speed, convenience, contextualization and non-stop connectivity.
Further, as newer generations are raised as “digital natives”, they are not only harder to surprise, but can also imagine for themselves how technology can be used to improve their lives. It is possible that children born today may never need to drive a car due to autonomous-driving technologies. It is even possible that humans will colonize Mars within a generation.
Digital transformation provides industry with unparalleled opportunities for value creation from expanding profit pools, creating new revenue models and enabling unprecedented access to global markets. It used to take Fortune 500 companies an average of 20 years to reach a billion-dollar valuation; today’s digital start-ups are getting there in four.
There have been numerous blunders. A staggering 70% of digital transformations fail. Although most companies and executives know how crucial it is to evolve with technology and create digital processes and solutions, putting it into action is a different story. Many companies have endeavored on digital transformations, only to hit roadblocks. Understanding what went wrong with the following three companies can provide guidelines of things to avoid and point future digital transformations in the right direction.
- Kodak, a technology company that dominated the photographic film market during most of the 20th century. The company blew its chance to lead the digital photography revolution as they were in denial for too long.
- One highly successful company that failed? Nokia, a company founded in Finland was the first to create a cellular network in the world. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nokia was the global leader in mobile phones. Nokia’s mistake was the fact that they didn’t want to lead the drastic change in user experience. This caused Nokia to develop a mess of an operating system with a bad user experience that just wasn’t a fit on the market.
- Why did blockbuster fail? The video-rental company was at its peak in 2004. They survived the change from VHS to DVD but failed to innovate into a market that allowed for delivery (much less streaming).Back in 2000, the founder of Netflix Reed Hastings proposed a partnership to the former CEO of Blockbuster John Antioco. Netflix wanted Blockbuster to advertise their brand in the stores while Netflix would run Blockbuster online. The idea got turned down by Antioco because he thought it was ridiculous and that Netflix’s business model was “niche business.” Little did he know that Hasting’s idea would have saved Blockbuster. In 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy and Netflix is now a $28 billion dollar company.
You don’t want your organization to fail while transforming digitally. Dont make the mistakes which companies in the past have made already , Learn and adapt from them.
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