How emerging markets can transform the way your business operates
Emerging markets are your chance not only to grow the core business, but to leap-frog digital capabilities, and spark your company’s transformation into a responsive organization.
Emerging markets are your chance not only to grow the core business, but to leap-frog digital capabilities, and spark your company’s transformation into a responsive organization.
Emerging economies have been a boardroom topic for decades. Sustained trends toward stability and increasing access to technology have made it easy to enter new markets. And as companies close the books on 2013, it’ll be hard to find an annual report from anyone in the FORTUNE 500 that doesn’t talk about global growth as essential to their company’s success.
As companies begin doing business in new regions, they have a choice: either replicate and reinforce 20th century models or use this chance to install an organizational operating system designed for the 21st century. The companies winning the global growth game 5 years from now will be the ones who use new markets to incubate and then spread this new way of working.
As Clay Christensen argues in the Innovator’s Dilemma, to enable true innovation, companies need to create an environment that is sufficiently independent of the mothership, so that the new business can grow on its own without the organizational baggage of the established business model.
Today, emerging global markets offer global corporations a unique opportunity to apply Christensen’s strategy, specifically to the task of digital transformation.
Whether you’re looking at the big players of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, or the lions of Sub-Saharan Africa, or the six markets to watch: Poland, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines, Turkey, and South Korea — these countries offer a chance to not only grow the core business, but to develop digital capabilities that leap-frog ahead of more established markets.
Healthcare businesses can develop and launch mobile solutions for rural regions. Education businesses can create agile product development teams that behave as start-ups focused on local users. Insurance companies can take mobile-first service experiences from the U.S. and Europe and introduce them to less mature markets in the east. Energy businesses can deploy lean squads on missions to build breakthrough hardware + software solutions. Consumer brands can build integrated product + tech experiences that are open and interoperable from day 1.
Intelligent investments in new markets will only become more critical to business performance over the next decade. Meanwhile, the pace of digital disruption keeps getting faster. Treating emerging markets as incubators for a transformative way of working is the key to harmonizing these two forces. Rather than weighing the organization down by bringing along the baggage of an obsolete operating model, successful business leaders will propel their organization forward by investing in an operating model designed for the future.