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The 10 polarisations for 2022A paradigm that finds its best application in the smart city, given the wide variety of data that a smart city is able to produce today for the benefit of the community.
Francis McDowell
By the term “Polarisations” at BIP we mean a combination of trends, changes, opportunities, fashions, and evidence that characterise the ecosystem of our companies, our society, and the markets we serve.
The last few years have marked an era, our era. And when we think that cycles of change and mutation are running out of steam, history, and innovation factors exogenous, or seemingly exogenous, to the dynamics of business models take us by surprise.
We started 2022 thinking it was a year of recovery. That it would be a time for us to catch up on our habits, goals, activities, and social life.
Current events make us increasingly aware that these cycles and consequently innovations do not follow the Gregorian calendar. We capitalise on the habit of self-imposed endings and restarts with individual years to pause, to crystallise some thoughts that can support further thinking and help us face challenges and new contexts.
This is our annual goal that we try to pursue with the “Polarisations”.
By the term “Polarisations” at Bip we mean a combination of trends, changes, opportunities, fashions, and evidence that characterise the ecosystem of our companies, our society, and the markets we serve. These are real tools that we use both in our analyses and in our project activities with clients to support idea generation and strategic scenario design. With this presentation we share with our ecosystem our 10 Polarisations that we think will characterise 2022.
With the aim of identifying from them ten trigger questions to support companies’ strategic and innovation activities during the year.
In the light of the fact that 2022 is teaching us that many of the statements we used in the previous two years such as “we will be better off” and “nothing will be the same as before” are starting to be strongly refuted.
Let us therefore open a discussion with all of you on the concept of “IsItNormal?”.
Many companies, regardless of their sector, find themselves in the situation of having to respond to new market dynamics and design new operating rules. Starting by asking new questions, which remains the fundamental characteristic of what we then call Innovation. Different questions to continue interpreting technological innovations, decoding market dynamics, capitalising on new skills, and using information.
Here are our suggestions.
Zooming - Co-thinking
The fact that our work patterns and daily habits have changed dramatically is an indisputable truth. A truth that, let us remember, applies exclusively to male and female workers who carry out activities that at other times we would have defined as office work. While not having to generalise, we can observe that our day is polarised between the time spent in virtual meetings (the so-called zooming effect) and the need, often the lack, of a real, direct, and emphatic confrontation with our colleagues. The questions on which many companies are focusing concern the organisation, management, and control of ‘from home’, remote activities that are also referred to as smart. But the real questions should be about how to organise, manage and innovate people’s activities in offices and common workspaces. We cannot expect to bring people into office life by doing the activities that have been modelled (comfortably) on the pace of working from home. It is not a question of quantifying the right balance of days spent working from home and days spent in the office (the famous 3+2), but rather of defining the most effective work methods according to the space where one works, whether physical or digital. Working in the office can no longer be a transposition of what one does and has learned to do at home.
Has your company defined the organisation of activities and the new tools needed to reconcile working from home with working at the office?
Local - Metaverse
Technological development is impacting on our concept of space, place, and location. Technologies such as new screens, 5G connections and the constant growth of computing power enable advanced AR/VR applications, giving rise to the first immersive experiences and the first immersive experiences in digital architectures. Technology is progressively enabling visions and predictions that belong to a past of literature and experimentation and to a present known in the videogame ecosystem. Digital architectures increasingly integrate real ones in all dimensions of the experience. At the same time, local experience, limited in space and time, is re-evaluated, and rediscovered in its dynamics of efficiency and security. Those ’15 minutes’ have become a rallying cry for the reorganisation of urban spaces to optimise everything needed to live and work within walking distance.
Have you adapted the organisation of your assets (offer, channels, locations) and your digital spaces to adopt the next technologies that will evolve the relationship models between man and machine?
Immersion – Selection
The amount of data and information, produced by digital mankind, has reached unthinkable heights, constantly requiring new systems of measurement, such as the brontoby that corresponds to about 1,000,000 zettabytes. We are immersed in an immense reservoir of content and news, where, however, it is increasingly difficult to verify the truthfulness and reliability, de facto subverting every rule of the traditional information system. We are immersed in the “Infosphere” (Floridi, 2020). We are immersed in a complex and unstable society, characterised by competition for attention spans and information overload. This increasingly pervasive reality contributes to the polarisation between the attention economy and the emotion economy. Between the autonomous ability to search for information, knowledge and build personalised schedules and the trust in relying on a third party capable of selecting what we need or what is more in line with our needs. The wealth of information generates a scarcity of attention spans. Attention scarcity increases the value of attention itself, transforming it into an asset to be managed in an immersive and autonomous way or to be given to those who can do it selectively, making selection the main service.
Does your company have a model for collecting, analysing, and interpreting information about your customers’ behaviour to feed behavioural, predictive, and prescriptive algorithms?
SustainSystem – Sustain-As-A-Service
Sustainability is following the same path as innovation. To capitalise on experience and not make the same mistakes, we need to focus on two key aspects if we want to talk about sustainable business models: contextualisation and strategy. If we talk about sustainability within an organised structure such as a company, we need to talk about corporate sustainability and, if we really want to pursue the path of sustainable business models, we need to build corporate sustainability leadership. Moving in this direction seriously confronts us with limiting patterns of how we view the role of a company and its management practices today. Choosing Corporate Sustainability can be a highly strategic choice that changes the way a company does business in a systematic way, but it can also be a vertical, tactical, and limited choice. There is no doubt that companies today are called upon to choose, to decide, to develop a vision of sustainable leadership. But let us not expect decisions to be unequivocal and above all the same scope. Let us get used to recognising and classifying the instruments and impacts of such choices in our role as stakeholders.
Is your company developing widespread leadership to align its business model with ESG principles?
Youtopia – Wetopia
The social and political dynamics of recent months and days lead us to think about the balance between individual and collective interests. We are more and more aware that individual well-being depends more and more on collective behaviour, and that it is less and less effective to think of ourselves as individually self-sufficient. This trust in collaboration and in the collective will in all its forms leads us to have to critically analyse both individualism (you) and the supra-individual dimension (we) to rethink social living that protects and allows people to be themselves and defines a collective well-being and benefit that is no longer the sum of the interests of individuals or of a part of them. A balance based on responsibility, respect, reciprocity, and common purpose. Let us abandon Kantian-style individual identity for a personal identity that is such if it is recognised and valued in a higher relational dimension in a network dynamic, which is something greater, such as the well-being of society and mutual respect.
Is your company experimenting with governance solutions and models that encourage delegation, accountability, and organisational decentralisation?
AccessiBElity – AccessiNEEDlity
Having addressed the existence of diversity and capitalised on the value of uniqueness with the dynamics of inclusion, today we need to integrate these preconditions not only in the way we design our products and services, but in all the company’s processes: between the need to build solutions for accessibility needs and being an accessible company in all its parts As far as the first aspect is concerned, the issue of accessibility has been addressed for many years by regulations that precisely regulate the scope of application on spaces, infrastructures, objects and services. They should be conceived, designed, and implemented so that as many people as possible can access them. This is Inclusive Design, the expression of an approach to design, aimed at shaping the environment and its elements by considering the capabilities and needs of all possible users (NEEDs). Designing according to the criteria of Inclusive Design goes beyond the limits of barrier-free design, presenting the issue not in negative terms (as the elimination of something) but rather as the proposal of new innovative solutions. This same approach can be extended to all business processes (BE) by considering the relationship between man and the environment in relation to the complexity of the company and not only its offer, characterising strategies and management choices based on flexibility in the light of the changing role of resources and their characteristics, and of situations requiring personalised choices.
Does the design of your products, services and business processes incorporate the criteria of inclusion and valuing user diversity?
TechnoFiction – ScienceReality
In times of crisis and emergency, the need and attention to predict the future, even in the short term, increases significantly. We analyse, estimate, and make sense of every bit of data and try to draw scenarios over time. For this reason, a very young Isaac Asimov imagined the first science fiction events in a very remote future at the time of the Second World War, following day by day the advance of Nazi troops in Europe. Today, in a post-pandemic context of international tensions, we interpret the futuristic scenario with exercises in style imagining the evolution of technology and its impacts. On the other hand, we are engaged in defining the foreseeable future, that which can be predicted, trusting in the dynamics of science, which is becoming the real engine of innovation. Whether Deep Science or applied sciences, there is an awareness that ‘exact’ sciences can help us to identify real futures that are quantifiable, measurable, and therefore understandable. We can therefore distinguish between two different ways of thinking about the future. The first continues the tradition of drawing up the evolutionary scenarios of digital technology and the second sees science, especially that closely related to basic sciences, as the lever for the next leap in the growth of human skills and well-being.
Does your company continuously monitor new technologies to assess their impact on your customers’ behaviour and on your business processes?
OTT – eOTT
What is the impact of business models on our buying habits? How well do business models compete in our attention economy? We buy most of the products and services for our attention from companies that are called ‘over the top’ (OTT). If we analyse our habits concerning these services in a polarised way, we can increasingly identify two macro-infrastructures that characterise the OTT business models. The first identifies time-efficient transaction-based infrastructures. These infrastructures have our attention and become our habits because they are easy to access and learn. They are our transactional OTTs, they cut across our needs and are used to optimise the efficiency of our buying processes. The latter are infrastructures based on the ability to grab our attention through experience, aesthetics, and emotion. It is our eOTTs (emotional), which also cut across our needs, which grab our attention because of their effectiveness and the depth of the solutions they offer. They grab our attention because they satisfy our emotions such as our sense of belonging, tradition, culture, pleasure, and hedonism.
Is your company devising and experimenting with new business models that are vertically and horizontally aligned with the current core business?
DopaTech – SeroTech
Our behaviour in using technological tools and their applications stimulates our neurotransmitters that affect our mood. We know that dopamine plays an important role in motivation and reward. Dopamine is released in the rest of the brain when a person does something and receives, or even expects a ‘reward’ or pleasure. This dopamine spike then motivates the person to continue performing the behaviour that brought them the reward. Technologies impact on this dynamic process of reaction, storage, and feedback. They exploit this gratification mechanism by getting us hooked on technology. Similarly, serotonin regulates mood also through empathy, creativity, and memory to define it as the hormone of happiness. Through the elaboration of satisfying interfaces and operational elements, capable of giving immediate satisfaction, artificial empathy, technology impacts on our ability to remember and get used to using certain applications and operational processes.
Does your company have a continuous and up-to-date model for collecting data and information on customers’ and employees’ opinions and behaviour regarding the purchase, use and abandonment of your products and services?
Circular Minds – Deep Minds
What kind of professional are you? In recent years, managerial and academic literature has provided many examples of the dynamics with which a professional, a company employee approaches his or her activities. We have the generalists (-Shaped) characterised by the interchangeability of tasks within a team, the experts (I-Shaped) ensuring a high degree of specialisation in each branch, the modular (T-Shaped) ensuring greater flexibility in team composition. The multi-potentials (M-Shaped) who have achieved strong cross-functional autonomy in their role; the leaders (X-Shaped) who combine functional leadership skills in the development and implementation of key strategies; finally, the potentials (P-Shaped) who have a solid generalist base and one or more specialisations. When analysing these profiles, two codes of analysis emerge, the first emphasising the transversal and circular capacity to manage and disseminate knowledge. Not only referring to oneself and one’s own context, but capable of impacting on related contexts through difference and contamination. The second focuses on the depth of knowledge and the ability to handle the tools of knowledge not statically but dynamically. To escape the tyranny of the known in an ever-changing context.
Are your models for analysing and developing the skills and profiles of your employees aligned with the speed and complexity of your industry’s business dynamics?