Winter is coming…

Michael A M Davies
Endeavour Partners
Published in
4 min readNov 13, 2018

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Back on 10 July, in high summer here in Boston, I celebrated the tenth anniversary on the morrow of the launch of the iPhone 3G, the first modern smartphone, by writing the first post on the reborn version of this blog: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…”.

Since then, the tenth anniversary of launch of the first Android smartphone, the HTC Dream (known as the T-Mobile G1 at launch in the United States) in September has also come and gone. It’s worth a flashback, because it shows how far we’ve come; it was a masterpiece of mechanical design, hedging its bets by including not just a mechanical trackball as well as its touch screen, along with a physical keyboard, but also dedicated keys for Send, End, Home, Menu, Back and the camera.

The HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1)

I described how the modern smartphone has created a network of nearly 4 billion people, all richly connected to one another, and to almost all of the world’s information.

It has unfortunately taken me much longer to write this second post because of what a good friend described aptly to me a couple of days ago as “tumult in my life…” — “…a state of change or uncertainty…” — over the last three or four months, which included amongst (several) other things our moving offices, and my moving homes.

Summer has come, and gone, and now winter is coming, both literally and metaphorically.

House Words of the House of Stark

As I explained, five complementary digital technologies — modern smartphones, cloud services, the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence and autonomous and collaborative robotics — comprise a powerful new digital platform, having unprecedented economic, social, political and environmental impact.

And the economic impact means that for some, winter is coming…

One of the most powerful impacts of this new digital platform is how it enables new business models, accelerates innovation, and energises entrepreneurship, throughout the economy.

It empowers digital disruption.

New born-digital ventures can combine radical new approaches to how they find, connect with and interact with customers (often D2C, social media, chatbots, ‘digital humans’), with very different business models (cloud services, AI, subscription). They can start small and fast, evolve quickly and scale rapidly.

Born-digital ventures can start small and fast, evolve quickly and scale rapidly

This threatens born-analog established enterprises. For many, winter is coming. Their erstwhile advantages from economies of scale and scope are increasingly encumbrances, slowing them down rather than empowering them.

While leaders of almost all incumbent businesses in every sector of the economy now acknowledge digitisation — and digital disruption in particular — as the most important issue facing their businesses, very few are yet responding effectively — we estimate fewer than one in ten.

Far too many, still think about digital primarily as either just a way to save time and money without any significant shift in the current business, or a way to do the same business better — better customer experience, new agile ways of working, and accelerated albeit incremental innovation — without creating new value or pursuing new business models.

We’ve found it really helpful to characterise the ways in which born-analog businesses are responding as stages in a journey.

Although these initial steps—becoming digitally efficient, and becoming digitally enabled—on the journey for a born-analog business to becoming a digital business are necessary, they are rarely sufficient

The real threats come from digital disruption to existing business models, and the real opportunities lie in finding ways to create significant new value, driving breakthrough innovation — becoming a digital explorer.

The key shift involves looking for the opportunities to create significant new value from this digital platform, through breakthrough innovations—while at the same time ensuring the current core business becomes more resilient. It involves looking beyond the current business, to find new customers, new applications and create new products.

We are working today with several businesses to help them navigate these challenges, and become digital explorers. And we’re also embarking on a program of sustained research, to deepen and broaden our understanding of how born-analog businesses are responding, and in particular to identify those who have relevant experience and lessons learned.

One aspect of that is looking for the illuminating case studies of how established enterprises are making the most effective use of these new digital technologies, and in particular how they’re using them to become digital explorers.

We would love to talk with you, if you’re interested in these issues—you can reach me at michael@endeavourpartners.net, or through LinkedIn.

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