I teach a class in Manhattan that focuses on designing innovative sustainable business models for firms targeting developing economies. At the least, my recent class’ research contributed to the consensus view that the new global networked economy is going to look very different than our national industrial economies looked over the past century. No big surprise there.
In a new, technology-driven, hyper-connected world that rests on technology, data becomes the basis for new IP. Digital services become the new products. And products become the new marketing. Firms must re-think their very nature of their structure, physical and otherwise. This has huge implications for brands that are focusing their innovation spending toward developing economies.
Here’s a way to think of the changes taking place. The business structure of the past century was hub-and-spoke. The headquarters and manufacturing facility for a beverage maker are generally centralized (hub). Resources are piped in from all over the world to make a patented concoction, and then product is distributed back out, all around the world (spokes).
Imagine now a different vision for how this might work. Not hub and spoke with the firm in the middle, but instead a more evenly distributed set of smaller, regional networks working in parallel. The new global brand would look more like a soccer ball, (less like an airline flight map), with businesses operating within each region providing lower impact, more sustainable solutions. The success of the organization then is as much about the management of these clusters and the connections in-between as it is about the product or service being offered.
But if we type “networks” into an image search, the results beget a question– What is all this telling me? I understand these beautiful maps are relaying information, but what am I supposed to DO with them? How do I use it? Moreover, the information tends to be reflective since it’s based on collected data. Telling me the way things were- perhaps just a moment ago- but still in the past.
Earlier this week, Stanley McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan reacted to a PowerPoint slide of a complex network.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter
The article then went on to point out PowerPoint as the culprit. But this article missed the mark. It’s not about the software (although it’s a huge contributor), as much as the inability of design to clearly articulate the relationships within the network. Again, the focus becomes those connections in-between. As we face more and more complex sets of data and networks of information, the implications of our ability (or inability) to communicate the realities is incredible. Or if you think of how the inability to understand the impact of derivatives within the financial system, or interrelationships of terrorist networks within our global population, it’s downright startling.
In the world of learning and academia, we often hear the number 3 or 7 referenced as the limit of “things we can absorb”. Is there a limit to our ability to comprehend these mass amounts of data? Do we really understand what these synapse-like illustrations of the World Wide Web are telling us? Or is it simply that we’re drawn to the beauty of that which we created, but can’t quite comprehend? Clearly, there’s a call for design to make comprehensible our ever-expanding world of social and technological networks. But perhaps more importantly, what are the risks if we don’t?
(eric wilmot)
