A New Business-Led Vision for 2025

John G. Singer points out the challenge in his article: The S&P 493 Has Run Out of Ideas.

He goes on to say this - Technology-led visions are the short road to parity. They produce monotonous repetition, lead to overload and boredom, and sustain the status quo.

I would have to agree, but for some - the BIGs - the status quo is exactly what they want. Have any of them really innovated in the last 10 years? I don't think so, it's more about ensuring their economic control points keep pumping out profits - innovation always plays second fiddle to that. So I looked at John's website for some inspiration. He talks about an ecosystem-centered market strategy: It is the process of intentionally combining ‘market sets’ to operate as a single organism.

That's a Super App 'technology-led vision. As Amy Webb points out in this free WSJ video: Tech CEOs Want to Make a ‘Super App.’ Here’s Why It’s So Hard. And she's right. Even Elon Musk who makes an appearance in the video hasn't solved the challenge. The only company that has is Tencent with WeChat, which is part of every Chinese person's daily life journey (1.2 billion of them engage every day). Every CEO would love to have their own Super App because it's incredibly profitable.

Super Apps enable an ecosystem-centered market strategy. Want some proof. Check out the market cap of Lyft vs Uber. Both are in the transportation vertical but only one offers a horizontal 'partnership'. Uber has 'intentionally' combined two market sets. And it's reflecting in their market cap which is 25 times higher than Lyfts.

Of course my next thought was how can they combined even more market segments? See the video above as to why that is almost impossible. It's incredibly hard to navigate across multiple market sets in the same solution. Uber's current app is now pretty much unusable. The Me Experience (MEX) has degraded so much that I've switched to Lyft. It does one thing really well and the MEX is great.

So, I thought about modifying John's ecosystem-centered market strategy by replacing one word - delete intentionally and replace it with dynamically to see if we could get add even more market sets while still offering a better Me Experience.

An ecosystem-centered market strategy is the process of dynamically combining ‘market sets’ to operate as a single organism.

By changing intentionally to dynamically we go from doing something on purpose, to something that changes or adapts based on conditions, often automatically e.g. a system that dynamically adjusts its behavior based on user input i.e. my real time data which is needed to solve the cold start problem.

Now we have a new business vision.

Profitably enable an ecosystem-centered market business strategy to dynamically unlock growth through vertical and horizontal partnerships, and tailor the experience to each customer in real time to drive continuous daily engagement.

Why are those last eight words so important? Because of this - Mind and Wallet share. Dynamically means receiving input from each customer, ergo the response should be tailored to each customer to drive daily engagement. On his website under Ecosystems John has the 4 characteristics of an ecosystem-centered market strategy. They're good. However let's see what happens when we drop in the word - dynamic. He hints at it in point two by talking about value alignment but it's too high level. We need more precision, we need to scale down to a single person (N of 1) That's also incredibly important for when we get into healthcare market segments which have to be tailored to individual variability.

Here we go.

1. System Entrepreneurship. Ecosystem-centered strategy is about [dynamically] combining ‘sets of markets’ to build new economic systems. Instead of market fragments acting in isolation from each other, [dynamic] ecosystems enable new possibilities to achieve objectives defined in terms of ‘system value’.
2. A New Paradigm in [Dynamic] Persuasion. By moving away from the sterile marketing parlance of brands and branding, ecosystems provide new metaphors, orientations, language, and ideas — a whole new taxonomy — to see and [dynamically] solve issues of ‘value alignment’ with the business and technology agendas of customers.
3. A Different [Dynamic] Innovation Agenda. Ecosystems enable ‘computational imagination’ in the space between healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. By [dynamically] connecting market fragments in new combinations, complex problems beyond the abilities of individual markets are solvable, and new capabilities are acquired.
4. High Leverage. [Dynamic] Ecosystems are high-leverage. Rather than trying to squeeze more life out of worn-out paradigms,

Conclusion.

Going from intentionally to dynamically changes everything. Everyone's ecosystem-centered market strategy will now be different as they focus on dynamically tailoring their particular mix of products, content, and or services to each of their customers in real time to drive continuous daily engagement.

It's time to change the technology-led vision and the short road to parity!

What's left?

Where are the tools to execute this new strategy? That's the challenge we've solved. We did it by doing a job very differently and breaking the constraints that define what is possible. Give me a DM to see how we did it.

Here's a shoutout to all the people who've helped me. Sorry if I've left anyone off the list.

Ela Shapira (for listening and offering very intelligent feedback). Ellen Brown (this is the future of health tailored to me) Robert Sundelius, FACHE (this is your 'flourishing ecosystem-centered market business strategy), Tom D. (for listening and reading way too many emails) Rick Langille (the Harvest Today ecosystem-centered market strategy that puts healthy food at the center of each person's world) Debbie Reynolds (because at the core of this is data privacy and for all the kindness you've shown me) For Nigel Scott (because of all the brilliant posts/insights he's offered). Sana Remekie for building an 'Digital Experience Orchestration engine' that sits perfectly in the middle of the ecosystem-centered market strategy. Graham Hill (Dr G) because you wanted a fundamental shift: from tactical CX initiatives to strategic experience design that creates meaningful differentiation - welcome to the Goldilocks app and MEX. For George Gicopoulos ?? Strategic Business Turnaround Accelerator I hope you find this interesting. Cornelia W this is the future of customer (MEX) engagement. Vadim Bulavintsev for HIRO.