Plugging into the right Digital Business Quadrant in the Disruptive Innovation Era

Part 2 continues
An optimal blend of platform, content, and customer centricity is vital for business model innovation. This means that companies need to strive to operate with agility so that it’s easy to play in any of the business model quadrants. This is the safest in the disruptive era. Let’s first put into perspective customer experience, platform, and content.
Customer experience is everything that wraps around your content which brings satisfaction and delight to the client. Investing in Customer Resource Management Systems, good user interfaces aided by modern design thinking, and most importantly connecting emotionally and empathetically with the customers are highly essential.
Platform is the method by which you provide your content to customers. Without platforms, companies will have to implement new solutions in response to every business need, thereby, creating a maze of systems. This has a side effect as customers get a fragmented, product-based experience rather than a unified, multi-product experience. Think about your online banking experience today, where you can see all your accounts in one place.
The disruptive era requires that businesses operate in more than one quadrant leveraging partnership and collaboration. For instance, most large enterprises operate in more than one model. Amazon as an ecosystem driver provides services to other businesses, including fulfillment (it handles the warehousing, packing, and shipping of one billion items) and technology capability (through Amazon Web Services), making it a Modular Producer at the same time. Another example, most banks now operate in the four quadrants owing to the endless and sophisticated demands of customers. They now act as a supplier – selling mortgages and investment products. At the same time, offering an omni-channel experience by reimagining the branch to be more of a customer acquisition, sales, and advisory location, with most transactions done digitally. The same bank still operates on modular by offering different services inclusive of payments and foreign exchange to many other enterprises. Finally into the ecosystem-driver quadrant, providing more complete services for life events such as buying a house, owning a car, or preparing for retirement. This sounds very interesting and amazing. This is why you see banks falling into different cadres in the hierarchy based on their capability across the four quadrants. This forms the basis of the disruptive era as businesses are compelled to rethink and re-align their value propositions and strategies ultimately.

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