WIRED PARTNERSHIP | ACCENTUREILLUSTRATION:^ MAÏTÉ^ FRANCHI^Before the turn of the twenty-first century,
the really successful businesses on the planet
were true specialists. Whether they were in
finance, automotive, retail or energy, most
major firms succeeded by producing a handful
of products or services and selling them to a
well-established customer group.
But in the last 20 years, a new business model
has replaced this old order. Today’s most valuable
firms don’t just produce goods – they connect
customers to the things they want. Welcome to
the age of the value network.
This new approach to business has completely
rewritten the rulebook. Instead of a transactional
relationship, platform firms build ecosystemsthat give customers a series of
connected products, services or
experiences. And at the heart of this
ecosystem is a positive feedback loop
powered by the platform economy’s
most valuable asset: data.
Creating a successful platform-based
business is about turning data from a
cost into a source of value, says George
Marcotte, Managing Director, Accenture
Applied Intelligence Lead UK and
Ireland. “You may think you’re in a certain
type of business, but in reality you’re
also in the data business,” he says.
Marcotte points to the examples
of Google, Amazon and
Microsoft as firms that
used data to identify a
huge marketplace for
cloud services – matching
up their spare capacity
with untapped customer
demand. “They’ve all taken
what is effectively a bigcost centre for them, and turned it
into a profit centre,” he says.
So how should firms make the
jump towards becoming a platform?
Marcotte says that they should start
by identifying new products and
services that are adjacent to their
core products. “Internally, there’s a
bunch of data that firms have that’s
trapped in siloed databases,” he
says. By letting data scientists and
strategic thinkers loose on that data,
firms can identify patterns about their
customer behaviour to infer needs
that they may not be servicing.
Once that customer need has been
identified, it’s time to put to the test
a new product or service that meets
that need. “As long as you can rapidly
ideate and test something, you get a
sense of what’s working and what’s
not,” Marcotte says. The key here is to
test new products quickly, using data
to judge which are successful. One
company Marcotte worked with tested
60 new financial service propositions
in five years, even though it wasn’t in
the financial services space at all.
This ability to quickly test new
propositions is a hallmark of software
companies, with weekly – or even daily- update cycles that enable firms to
trial new ideas at speed and throw out
the ones that aren’t working. And once
they’re in the marketplace, good new
products tend to find a home, he says –
pointing to the example of FirstHome-
Coach, a startup that brings together
solicitors, mortgage providers and
insurers into one platform, reducing
the hoops that people need to jump
through to get on to the property ladder.
But if other firms want to make the
leap to becoming a platform, there’s
only one way forward, Marcotte
says: experimentation. “The pace of
advancement is driven by your ability
to test and industrialise at speed.”
Welcome to the ageof the value networkBy harnessing the insights hidden in their data, companies can
give their customers the products and services they truly want‘The pace of advancement is
driven by your ability to test
products at speed’ - George
Marcotte, MD, Accenture Applied
Intelligence Lead UK & Ireland09-19PRAccenture.indd 44 13/07/2019 02:07