Low-code/no-code for Business: Transforming, Re-inventing, but also Re-purposing our businesses

During last few years I assisted to an acceleration in producing strategic studies and analysis that try to depict or better “decode”, as AI/deep learning models use to refer, the next future for our private and for some extent for our public entities, at multiple levels.

The perspective is a long-term one and starts from speculating and decoding what is happening nowadays in terms of pressures and changes including the pervasive de-materialization of processes and even de-materialization of organizations.

In fact, in addition to the option to create multiple digital twins of individuals and things that will live, according to some visions, in multiple dimensions in “verses”, a number of contextual real pressures are influencing our behaviors as individuals and as group including geopolitical tensions, COVID-19, compromissions to our (digital)security and safe, movement of centers of gravity of business interests from global and pervasive perspective to local and even micro-local, and many more.

I was intrigued in reading the short synesis produced by Sandra Sancier-Sultan : “Turning a transformation into a reinvention” (https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/email/rethink/2022/12/2022-12-14d.html ) that assembles multiple point of views in one short reading about this phenomena.

According to Sandra we are accelerating in a way that we need to consider multiple options about business evolution stages in each moment and not just one. It is not just doing a pivoting but even more profound act.

(Digital)Transformation is not enough even in the short or at least medium perspective, new models should be considered like Business Re-invention even in short time ranges. Re-invention is not new. It is easy to be observed in multiple “old” companies what this means: IBM, for instance, the company with which a journeyed during last 27 years, re-invented itself at scale multiple times if you consider the more than 100 years old history, moving from being a salami cutter machine maker to a quantum computing builder. The distance between these two extremes is far and clearly is an example of re-invention. Not words to say about that.

So, business re-inventing is typically a long-range evolution model that we observe but slowly. Of course, it relates to other definitions like “be disruptive” that refers perhaps to an alternative way to refer to the same strategic pressure.

The change here is that everything is open to change and challenged, starting from tomorrow. In fact, Sandra, points out that “Business leaders expect that by 2026, half of their companies’ revenues will come from products, services, or businesses that haven’t been created yet”, that in such a sense is a classic companion of what individuals perceive when we say that we need to prepare employees (and not only students) for jobs that don’t exist yet before.

Re-inventing is to re-create or to rebalance in different terms the well know formula with the three key ingredients: talents, capital, and resources. All in one time and not just acting on a single dimension. There are forces that are now providing the right context to influence our intents to change in addition to the once I mentioned before and it is well-being, responsibility, or sustainability. Multiple concepts that share the same root that is, in my opinion, the need for business re-purposing.

My feel is that we need also additional concepts such as “re-purpose” and find ways to re-purpose also in business terms. From a technical perspective we already observed in multiple contexts this act. For instance, in drug repurposing practice. The public learned about its existence to fight COVID-19 when research efforts aimed to find ways to contrast the virus (see https://hms.harvard.edu/news/repurposing-familiar-drug-covid-19 )

In drug repurposing when we are looking to design a new drug, we could start to consider also well-known drugs, already into the market, and see if they could produce, off-label, benefit in other contexts. So re-applying the same solution to solve a different problem.

In such a sense the open innovation movement, started from prof. Chesbrough at the University of California, Berkeley, provides the canvas to operate in this way and it is the time to leverage it as Linus Dahlander and Martin Wallin argue (https://hbr.org/2020/06/why-now-is-the-time-for-open-innovation ).

With Open Innovation having outside-in and inside-out perspectives you have more chance to capture the opportunity to transform but mainly to re-purpose your equation. But it is just a canvas, upon which, you can paint multiple drawings, we need brushes and colors ready to be used.

My feeling is that there is the need to take re-purposing at scale to generate new business evolutions in a more agile or quick ways. Perhaps a Low-code/no-code for Business is needed. Low-code/no-code movement for those operating into the digital word is a major trend that points to hyper simplify the ways digital applications or apps are built even with no IT experts by using visual tools and more and more Artificial Intelligence driven interfaces.

Low-code/no-code for Business shares the same style and urgency but considers as building blocks pieces of businesses. The ideal scenario is to have the option to mix and re-mix services and businesses with a result to re-purpose a complex business formulas in a new context.

Why do we need a Low-code/no-code for Business? Because the key ingredients, Talents, Capital and Resources are changing themselves in their nature or at least the context in which each of them live.

Low-code/no-code for business allow talents to build and deploy and re-deploy businesses in new ways. ?As for the Low-code/no-code in coding this activity could be simple by providing way to rapidly iterate and test new business ideas and allowing global entrepreneurs to build and deploy business prototypes quickly and easily by leveraging shared capitals and resources. Finally, low-code/no-code platforms for business can also be useful for businesses that want to empower their employees to build and deploy business ideas that can help them be more productive and efficient. By giving users the ability to build and deploy custom solutions, businesses can enable their employees to solve problems and automate tasks in ways that are specific to their needs.

Of course, this is an ideal scenario, but the trajectory to go toward it is possible. Perhaps we need to systematically “unlearn” to recombine and move forward as Barry O'Reilly in his ?“Unlearn: ?Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results” (https://www.amazon.it/Unlearn-Success-Achieve-Extraordinary-Results/dp/1260143015 ) elegantly argues.

Pietro Leo is an Executive Architect in IBM Italy, a well-known Innovation Agitator and free thinker. Member of the IBM Academy of Technology and Head of IBM Italy Center of Advanced Studies. You can also follow him on Twitter (@pieroleo).

My blog posts on are also on my Personal Site: https://pieroleo.com