
How Disruptive Innovation Created the Internet of Everything
Published July 26, 2015
Joe Novak
Founder Of Empire Builders
Eau Claire, WI
I believe today’s economic development agencies and the National Chamber of Commerce are completely dismissing the impact from the global “internet of everything” on American business, manufacturing and start-ups. American business is in a long phase of global “disruptive innovation” post the great recession.
What is “disruptive innovation”? It’s a combination of market change that creates new markets, value networks, and consumer buying habits that eventually disrupts traditional markets, thus displacing existing business models. Many tech. entrepreneurs know global competition is fiercely applying “disruptive innovation” by means of the “internet of everything”. Few startup accelerators have the experience to challenge these market disrupters. To understand what market disrupters know, you will have to read on.
As many global multi-national tech. companies know, in the 1990’s America had an economic bubble. Much of that bubble was caused by wild investment speculation. Some of that speculating was in the internet domain name market. The clear fact is the internet we know today was just a “pipe dream” then, until now. The idea of the internet in the 1990’s looked good in theory. There was a clear understanding of how the internet could work for locating products, services and brands online, but there was no clear infrastructure built to navigate it. Fast forward twenty-plus years…much of everything we do today is done using the internet. The “internet of everything” is no longer a speculative pipe-dream; it’s the third economic boom that other countries and multi-national tech. companies are investing heavily in.
This third global economic revolution brewing couldn’t be any more obvious as we look at the shifts and positioning in global trade and the global use of digital currency. Each time our lawmakers attend a global trade summit, it seems we are ill-equipped in the language of “the internet of everything” and digital currency. Delegates from the I.M.F. to India, seated at the table, must say behind closed doors, “They really don’t understand what is and will be driving/displacing future global trade markets”.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road for the future of American business, manufacturing, innovators and startups… It starts with understanding how today’s consumers initiate product and service consumption. Consumer’s today are casting overboard the traditional way of doing commerce. Consumers now search the global internet for services/products like: "home decorators". A consumer will put in the auto-fill search box “home” and watch “decorator” fill in the rest of the search query. This happens also with voice-command-search using desktop and mobile.
For example, a well-known national home improvement chain understands that a decade of Google search analytics revealed that consumers weren’t searching for their brand, but searching specific keywords like “home decorators”. This well-known company identified the new way consumers searched as well as the device they used… mobile. By identifying the new market trends, this business was able to apply current solutions to a potentially long-range disruption. Additionally, over time, this company should be able to capture more mobile consumers with pin-point accuracy using their home decorators domain name and complex digital ad media programs, thus cementing stock market gains, margins, and market share.
Once traditional consumers adjust to online shopping’s ease of use, online shopping will grow exponentially in 2015. This couldn’t have been any more evident than Amazon’s bold move to introduce a 2015 mid-summer cyber deal extravaganza called “Amazon Prime Day” meant to rival previous online sales. As many ill-equipped retail sales executives observed, the well-executed mid-summer “disruptive” cyber sale was a huge success. Many have asked by what standard of success? It wasn’t so much about the retail sales numbers as it was the data within those sales. I’m certain the data will demonstrate traditional desktop consumers are buying online with confidence, using mobile and product keywords searches. I assure you the amount of data gathered by Amazon will reflect in Amazon’s fourth-quarter profit reports post 2015 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
For economist, the many topics applied above were in long discussions leading up to the “New York Hard Assets Investment Conference”, May of 2008. One of the many topics was the global shift towards “gold backed digital currency” and its impact on trade.
Moving forward, traditional businesses need to shift/embrace the new ways of capturing markets and those once traditional consumers who now buy online with confidence in the global marketplace using digital currency.
As many businesses observe industry disruption happening across the globe, pin-pointing the disruption in their own industry is elusive and executing an effective solution is even more elusive.
Often companies will assign the task of identifying market disruption to ill-equipped executives. Rather than executing a comprehensive think-tank action plan, these assigned executives will gravitate to the safety of like-minded individuals at paid membership networking and golfing events. At these events, many of these well paid executives realize they are all hiding from the same imminent market crisis, down-market disruption.
Instead of consulting with 21st century global market experts, executives will turn to their I.T./ marketing/other departments. These departments will offer suggestions of lavish seminars and technology expos that become nothing more than expensive luxury vacation destinations.
At the conclusion of these seminars and expos, marketing departments find that the advancing changes to the traditional business model created by disruptive innovation is well beyond their scope of knowledge. Digging out a last minute solutions, these executives will hire an outside digital consulting firm only to have calculated and systematic sabotage carried out by the marketing department in hopes the recently hired consulting firm doesn't expose years of missteps, thus the Achilles heel of the entire company.
Like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt and Ford, these visionary Empire Builders had identified “disruptive innovation” long before their competition. As a result, American empires were built.
Empire Builders llc.
We Don't Follow The Digital Economy... We Help Shape It!