“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money”
Is collaboration better than competition? I think it probably is when taken as a fundamental business operating system i.e. when brands that share a common belief get together to explore new opportunities together.
What we mean by collaboration as an operating model is a root and branch rethink of the way business actually works – away from a market share driven approach to something based around share of wallet.
Old school thinking:
Define a competitive position and defend it
Grow by increasing market share i.e. selling what you do to more people
Keep resources such as smarts, technology, talent to yourself (see them as a source of competitive advantage)
New school:
Define the role you play in people’s lives and seek out others who share that role
Grow by increasing share of wallet i.e. extend what you do in order to meet the needs of your constituents
Share resources with other like minded organisations who share the same belief system – who share your aims
Adidas + 2012 not Ebay + Skype Bono + RED not Will.I.am + Intel Tata Docomo not Nokia Microsoft
Maybe it’s a new way to think about collaboration – a match based on belief rather than capability. A union based on love rather than convenience?
Last week one of the UK’s brightest stars got snuffed out. Modec was a maker of funky electric commercial vehicles – near silent delivery trucks that the likes of Tesco, UPS and FedEx had started using. (You really have to look both ways before crossing the roads nowadays).
Electric Vehicle technology may not provide all the answers to sustainable mobility – but few will deny that it’s a pretty important area. But the most interesting and forward thinking players are small, starved of capital and seemingly perpetually teetering on the brink. ThinkEV, Tesla, BetterPlace, REVA – all really exciting companies, all well respected, none of them more than niche. Meanwhile the mass manufacturers like Renault see Electric Vehicles as a source of future differentiation and therefore something to be protected and defended at all costs. Getting all paranoid about putative Chinese spies under the bed.
Why get so competitive about it? Why not collaborate? The world needs sustainable mobility, and the means to achieving it stretch way beyond the resources of one company. Think how much more the auto industry could achieve – together – if all the players dropped their ‘default competition’ mode and started thinking in ‘default collaboration’ mode. The most forward thinking brands in the world are those that understand clearly the role that they play, rather than obsess about the ‘position’ they are defending.They seek out partners who share their aims and they work with them to achieve their common aims. Think Boots and Macmillan; M&S and Oxfam; Kate Moss & Topshop; Nokia and Microsoft; Tata and Docomo; iphone and google maps; and even Heston Blumenthal and Little Chef. This is the end of competition as a business model.
Getting electric vehicles into the mass day-to-day market requires a massive sharing of resources (smarts, technology and money) if it’s going to happen at anything more than a snail’s pace. And we need it - fast. Fuel prices are heading skywards. But without a fundamental change of thinking in the boardrooms of the automotive oligopoly it won’t happen fast enough.
I hope Modec is an exceptional case. I fear it isn’t.
So, with the launch of the new iPhone 4 yesterday the big question shouldn’t be whether we’ll all get one. I’m sure we will.
While the hardware looks typically powerful, beautiful and lustworthy it seems that Apple has a major cloud problem.
Syncing with iTunes has become such an anachronistic idea that I’m surprised that it comes from Apple. If we weren’t already used to it and someone launched this today, there’s no doubt there’d be a lot of head scratching going on.
MobileMe, which is their attempt at cloud services is also pretty much terrible to use.
Ford, in contrast, just launched a pretty amazing cloud service to demonstrate what our lives will increasingly be like. It takes a Google maps address from your phone and connects it with your sat-nav via bluetooth, calculating the optimum route in the cloud. To quote their press release “Printing paper directions from a website is a relic in our digital age.”
Which, in a slightly roundabout way brings me to Microsoft.
Often written off in terms of the mobile market, there is no doubt that Microsoft let Apple, RIM and Android overtake them. As Steve Ballmer said, “we missed a whole cycle” which in technology terms is a huge statement.
However, as this article demonstrates, the new Windows Phone 7 is going to pack a major punch. Enterprise integration through Office and Exchange, the world’s largest gaming network through Xbox Live! and arguably superior entertainment software with Zune (including the definitely superior Zunepass).
The killer app, however, probably won’t be any of these directly. For the first time we’re going to see the whole Microsoft ecosystem in the hands of the consumer on their phone. And not only that, but MIcrosoft are betting on the cloud, and they are betting big.
Cloud services like the one described above from Ford (or the awesome Kin Studio) represent a level of utility we couldn’t have conceptualized even a couple of years ago, and will increasingly define what we look for in a phone.
Just like a computer, the hardware itself will quickly become something which you just don’t need to be any faster, bigger or better. Instead you’ll worry more about how useful it is and how easy it makes your life.
So while I’m sure that Apple will sell boatloads of their new phone, I’m much more interested in how the cloud will change the future.
And if Apple are going to win there, they’ll not just need a sexy new device that lets you make video calls, they’ll need to revolutionize their approach to the cloud.
