Transcript

Hey this is Jeffrey Tjendra the founder of Business Innovation Design. I’ll be sharing with you about the relationship between technology, business, and consumer.

There’s a hospital that I visited before the pandemic. This is one of the top hospital that didn’t have an electronic medical record and was scheduling their patients manually. Now I visited the same hospital the other day during pandemic, and suddenly the electronic medical record was there along with other digital services to serve patients.

What happened before COVID-19 is that a lot of companies in different industries were not keeping up with technology to be more competitive and they are taking their own sweet time. The pandemic instantly changed human behavior where people now expect consumption of products and services or access to consumption to be digital first.

Naturally, a business is built to change logarithmically.

On the other hand technology changes exponentially.

But high growth companies are expected to grow exponentially.

But there are 2 types of gap between technology change and organization change.

The first gap happens when a company implements technology that is not matured enough to be adopted in the market. It could be very expensive like hydrogen fuel or it could be not as feasible, like PDA brought to market by Apple back in the 90s. 

This is called the technology gap. When a company is unable to materialize its ideas with existing technology.

The second gap is called the innovation gap.

To close the innovation gap, companies need to innovate. 

What that means is to keep up with technology trends, anticipate emerging technologies and implement them to both old and new problems.

Humans on the other hand gets shaped by technology exposed to them. The way they get exposed to new technology is dependent of companies introducing them to market in the same industry or from other industries.

What that means is that the consumers are having higher expectation of what they should consume. Some expectations are expressed, some consumers don’t express them and live in the state of status quo. 

So the line here represents consumer expectation that changes quickly depending on the evolution of new technology exposed to them.

If a company fails to bridge the innovation gap to meet the consumer explicit and implicit expectations driven by technology advancement, the gap widens. What happens next is that the company as the incumbent will become irrelevant in the market when competitors are adopting the new technology to serve the same consumers.

This often means that companies need to change their business model into one that is sustainable.

The taxi industry had enough money and the head start to adopt new technologies before ride sharing services like Uber made the first move. They are simply implementing new technology to solve an old problem and the rest is history.

I hope this insight is useful to you. 

And If you’re looking to close the innovation gap, we at Business Innovation Design has a proven to innovate and go from 0 to 1. See you next time.