CREATING SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES ON DISRUPTION TIMES

The great disruption that we are currently experiencing affects all the vortices of our societies, and in general, the physical and digital world that surrounds us. The current disruptive era is marked by an unprecedented pace of change and transformation. Technological advancements are occurring at an exponential rate, leading to rapid shifts in industries and business models. Creating sustainable competitive advantages today is more difficult and fiercer than ever. Achieving and maintaining competitive advantages in this environment is more challenging than ever. Traditional business models based on scarcity are being replaced by models based on abundance, where the key challenge is filtering and managing the vast amount of available information and resources.

As if that were not enough, most organizations and institutions are designed to resist change, and this goes against the nature of this disruption that we have been experiencing and that has become an engine of prosperity and sustainable growth in the long run. term. People tend to prefer comfort and safety over change and uncertainty. Encouraging society to embrace change and progress is a central challenge. If we learn and understand from these disruptions, then we will be in a more favorable position to generate 'abundance' in the business and/or industry we are in. And right here is where the ability we have as individuals or organizations to identify these disruptions, analyze them, understand them, and put them into practice, will be the new source of generating truly sustainable competitive advantages.

? The pattern of duplication that Moore's Law showed us in the computing industry has been replicated over and over again in a large number of technologies. In addition to each of these industries disrupting themselves, they are also converging with each other, causing new transversal disruptions and effects never seen before. We can see this effect, for example, in the medical industry, where the resolution at which we obtain brain images doubles every year. However, what we have not been able to understand is that the universe, like any business or industry, does not work linearly, but rather exponentially, especially when digitalization comes to it.

It is a fact that we are rapidly digitizing the world as we know it. We are moving from the material to the digital, from the physical to the virtual. We can understand this transition through the evolution of the photography industry. When film cameras existed, the photography model was based on scarcity, since the total cost of having a physical photograph was significant (camera, film, developing, and printing). If we add to this the photography courses and other professional accessories in some cases, the unit cost was higher. In this example, when the photography industry went digital years ago, it transitioned from a physical environment to an information-based digital environment.

Continuing with the previous example, the transition of this industry caused the marginal cost to plummet to practically zero since now you can take a hundred photographs or a million, and this cost does not vary, directly affecting the model and the previous scarcity environment. that predominated and generated economic profitability for businesses. Likewise, from the large number of photographs we take, we can choose the best and with the filters and tools already integrated into mobile devices, we will have a quality very close to the professional quality of the first model.

The transition from physical to digital is a common theme across industries. As everything becomes more digitized, the marginal cost of producing or accessing digital goods and services approaches zero, disrupting traditional revenue streams. This caused businesses based on scarcity, which were the leaders of the industry, to no longer be leaders, and even the majority of them to no longer generate any type of income in this new digital model based on information. Therefore, we can affirm that when an industry digitizes, traditional income plummets quickly.

A very interesting effect is that a digitized model leaves aside the problem of scarcity and brings to the table a problem of selection and storage. Nowadays with digital photography, we have copies of our photos on various devices, but we cannot find what we need or are looking for optimally. It went from being a source problem to a filtering problem.

Just as this transition completely revolutionized the world of photography, the same thing is happening in 20 other industries at this very moment, and if that were not enough, these changing industries are also converging with each other, generating even more, never-before-explored possibilities. Industries are not only undergoing digitization but also converging with one another, creating new opportunities and challenges. This convergence leads to the exploration of uncharted possibilities. The businesses that are flourishing in this new digital model are now dedicated to selling and managing abundance. We stopped being owners of something physical and now we are owners of filtering and managing abundance.

Understanding and embracing exponential growth is crucial for businesses and institutions. Linear projections often fail to capture the rapid changes and potential disruptions caused by exponential growth. One of the biggest drawbacks to predicting the future behavior of industries under this new disruption is that experts continue to use linear projections to determine new scenarios, however, they have failed to realize that the world and everything around us is growing exponentially. When we have exponential growth, we must learn to break the linear paradigm in our heads and achieve a radical disruption of the status quo.

These disruptions that converge with each other are affecting all institutions, education, journalism, monetary systems, legal systems, healthcare, intellectual property, and in general, every industry is affected. Today's leaders cannot cope with these transitions, as they have been trained on the status quo, things move too fast and they fail to keep up. Traditional leaders may struggle to adapt to the fast-paced, disruptive environment. New leaders are needed to break the status quo, embrace change, and build businesses that thrive in an era of abundance. For this reason, one task we have is to train a new class of leaders capable of breaking the status quo and building businesses that take advantage of abundance and generate prosperity.

In the particular topic of education, for example, if today we find ourselves pursuing a master's degree in any subject, but specifically in fields such as technology, advanced robotics, biotechnology, or neurosciences, literally when we finish and graduate, we will already be outdated, since the pace of growth is faster than our ability to teach it through education. The pace of technological change makes it challenging for traditional educational models to keep up. Individuals must adopt a mindset of lifelong learning and adaptability to remain relevant in their fields.

We can achieve great things with a different mindset in this era of disruption. The central question is based on how to ensure that society adopts this way of thinking since people prefer not to seek and accept change, since, by nature, being in a safe zone and a space of comfort generates pleasure for us. and calm. People prefer to feel comfortable than to undertake the adventure and try to be happier with this new scheme.

In summary, technology and digitalization are the primary drivers of progress and positive change in the world. Understanding and effectively implementing these changes is critical for creating sustainable competitive advantages. Exponential revolution and digital transformation are setting significant challenges and opportunities to industries and organizations. Technology has to be seen as progress that can improve the world drastically. It is a fact that the only thing that is driving progress in the world is technology and digitalization. We must learn to assertively understand these changes, and their direct and secondary effects in the short, medium, and long term, but, above all, learn to implement them quickly and effectively in industries, businesses, and society in general to truly and certainly manage to create sustainable competitive advantages in our businesses.