The Innovators Challenge

Photo by William Daigneault on Unsplash​

What it takes to prepare your business for the upcoming decade

With the end of 2019 a decade full of innovations has ended. Over the past 10 years the world of business has rapidly changed. Traditional services, such as banking and shopping, have gone online and businesses are now run a new way. Likely the biggest challenge in the past years has been the digitalization of business models. CEO's, Entrepreneurs and Managers faced the challenge to keep up with the digital revolution. We are now at a point where most children know much more about smartphones, computers and the internet than their parents. How is that?

Children usually learn much faster than adults. Their environment has also changed from the old generations, as new digital possibilities are just a daily part of their lifes, it is more intuitive to them. As every generation before them, their way of thinking conforms to contemporary possibilities rather than old traditions. Growing up with such a digital input their way of tackling problems is different than the way adults use to think or find solutions for specific problems.

How is this affecting businesses? Businesses, especially managers and entrepreneurs, should adopt this way of (mostly creative) thinking, to keep up with the rapidly innovating world. As the people are changing and adopting, businesses should do so alongside them.
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The graph visualizes that leaps in technology are occuring at an ever increasing rate, meaning that businesses lagging behind have to allocate more and more budget to simply keep up with new trends and technologies. 

This trend is unlikely to stop in the years to come, challenging businesses and testing their speed of adaptation. 
The past 20 years made many companies disapear because of an unwillingness to adapt. This void is being filled by new companies versed in their current technological level. With that in mind we should be aware of the challanges coming this decade and be ready for upcoming new trends and technology.

Making the right preparations 

The Lean Approach gained a lot of attention and recognition in the past decade. We think that this approach will be the most important tool for progress this decade. Still, we can not predict the development speed of some innovations, there is the possibility that we will need a completly new method for leading companies and developing new products in just a few years.
The challenge is that many businesses failed to integrate the past innovations and are currently trying to catch up. If the market is evolving even faster most companies will have a hard time staying competetive and face the danger of coming to a complete stop and eventually disapearing as many others have done before.

"How can wee keep up, maybe even use these circumstances to our advantage?"

Being aware of the upcoming shift of oportunities is the first step of realizing it as an advantage.  This change will bring new competitors, increasing the challange for everyone brave enough to sail the seas of international markets. The correct mindset is a needed prerequisit for this vojage, it is what we call "Startup Thinking". This way of thinking includes quickly addapting processes in small iterations, allowing in-time responses to new findings. Even large comapnies are starting to adapt these methods in specific departments, realizing that it is essential to adapt faster than ever before to upcoming trends and using innovative new methods.