Flushing your notion of now
How long do you spend creating your value proposition, and, how often do you update that proposition? This is not really limited to the business development and marketing aspects, by the way. This notion applies to design, development, branding and all aspects of the product or service delivery lifecycle. Consider this, per Moore’s law, technology, data-storage capabilities and computing speed double in capability roughly every eighteen months. The power of the network increases exponentially for each new user on the system. If these are true, how are network capacity increases and technology advances changing the value of your products and services? A value proposition created just 2 years ago is in serious jeopardy of being severely outdated.
Stone’s Law – a value proposition or business idea decreases in relevance by 50% every 2 years.
Causes:
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Networks, that change the social fabric of your supply chain, are being created. These networks can be electronic or mobility. But they change every day and so do the habits of your customers.
- New technology, that changes the needs and dependencies of your customer, is being deployed.
- New innovations, that disrupt the current approach to the world’s problems, are being developed.
So what? Understanding the impact of technology and networks on your business requires you to create a strategy that refreshes old assumptions, challenges yesterday’s products and embraces change for tomorrow. Every product offering should be designed for change. Retooling physical and virtual (software based) products should be the new status-quo. Not change for the sake of change, but creating an operating system or design methodology that is self refreshing.
Tips:
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Detailed communications with customers should be performed regularly. You should be looking for changes in the way your customers are adapting and using technology.
- Review your business plan and business assumptions annually, if not semi-annually. This is not a detailed review. Simply ensure that environmental assumptions still hold true. Did you plan for you customers to continue to purchase data on CD’s? Is that still a valid assumption?
- Anticipate how network and technology changes are going to disrupt your business. Can you position yourself in the middle of the change?
As advances in technology become a commodity, applied creativity is king. It’s no longer about the coolest widget, it’s about applying these technologies to problems in ways that haven’t been done before.
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