There I was on the island Vis far out in the Croatian archipelago, surrounded by beautiful turquoise water to participate in a workshop about water shortage on small European islands arranged by the Water Saving Challenge Project. Once again the same ingredients; a wickedproblem, a diverse group of knowledgeable actors and the tension between holistic ambitions, and specific and localized solutions – they seem to attract my attention. Collaboration, cross-sectoral dialogues and broad participation are argued for as key measurements in almost all sustainable development policies. This seems logical given that the present complex challenges require combination of a diversity of knowledge, and multi-scale and multi-sector approaches. However, I think we have all been participating in too many workshops, discussing challenges, barriers and potentials, with a nagging feeling that it is not enough for the needed societal transformation. I was curious to find out if the workshop at Vis could be different.
Foresight and avoid painting yourself into a corner
Did you know that the average CEO only spends about 2% of their time on long-term issues? Maybe you expected it to be more since factors like volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) has made it so much more difficult to make decisions that leads to success in the markets of the future?
Profiting from Future Orientation
All our decisions are about the future and therefore they have to tackle the fundamental problem of its unpredictability. To make matters worse, the unpredictability increases exponentially with the length of the timeframe due to two drivers:
- The number of factors to consider and the number of interconnections between them simply grows too large, creating so called “wicked problems”.
- The long series of interactions make minimal changes in initial conditions cause very different outcomes due to the so called “butterfly effect”.
This may discourage investing more effort into future thinking, but at the same time research is showing that this is exactly what is needed! The positive effect of future orientation has been confirmed in several studies. One research project, for example, finds that only 6% of firms have a time-horizon longer than 5 years, but nearly all of these ranked high in business performance.
How Elon Musk solves problems
Elon Musk have change the car industry with Tesla, and projects like Hyper loop and SpaceX often reach the news. But in this interview he talks about how he want to change the way we build tunnels for cars by changing the tools and the requirements for the tunnel. It is interesting to see how he adress a problem and how he step-by-step working towards a solution. Look at the interview about 3D tunnels and the future for Elon Musk.
You drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. So that’s roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there. Then tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that’s a factor of eight.
Sustainable vs. profitable – carefully walking the ridge
The transformation into a sustainable society is one of the toughest challenges facing humanity. Even with a consensus regarding the need to decrease and prevent the negative impact on the environment, many strategic considerations remain. Choosing strategies (what should be done?) as well as tactics (how should it be done?) wisely, may significantly improve success rates. Doing the right thing has though been shown, even with the best intentions, to be very difficult. The challenge is exceptionally complex and encompasses very intricate considerations and judgements. There is a need to categorize and illustrate possible routes in a simplified way to facilitate evaluation and communication.
Analyzing potential and investments made within cleantech, two major categories surface: sustainable technologies that are presently not profitable or competitive on their own merits and incremental improvements decreasing the negative impact of well established technologies. Läs mer
Where is technology taking the economy?
Everybody interested in, and concerned about, the now ongoing digital revolution and its impact on business, on the economy and on society should read the article; Where is technology taking the economy? The article is written by Professor W. Brian Arthur and is published in the McKinsey Quarterly October 2017.
The credibility of the article is supported by how nicely it connects to “Part I – How
technology drives economic and social transformations”
in Robert D. Atkinson´s 2004 book “The Past and Future of America´s Economy / Long Waves of Innovation that Power Cycles ofGrowth”. A book that is instrumental in order to understand the mega impacts of disruptive technology systems in general and the digital revolution in particular. For this reason is that book since a decade required reading at the Executive Program in Industrial Management at KTH EXECUTIVE SCHOOL.
Despite the limited size of the article, Professor Arthur succeeds in vividly providing the reader with:
Lean start-up in mature companies
New innovative idea starts with assumptions. But how do we move from assumptions to facts and business as fast as possible? Today we discuss Lean Start-up in mayor companies together with Andy Cars.
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
Jack Welch
Improve sales by thinking like a customer – acting like an owner
“Think like a customer – act like an owner.”
Sales and pricing are two of the most important questions in a business. Anders Rehnberg our “sales professor” explains how this can revolutionize your offering and pricing.
Anders Rehnberg from Privilegium Group in London, is a pricing and sales expert that revolutionize many peoples views on sales and pricing. He has gotten Chines companies to stop reducing prices and often receives the comment such as “The best training I have ever attended” from the participants. He provides new tools and increase your courage to take your company to the next level and open up opportunities.
Most companies are great at developing their product or services, but rarely develop their pricing strategy.
Four critical issues that drive the need and urgency to improve your pricing strategy:
- How much money do we lose due to outdated pricing principles?
- How can we get out of the cost-plusprice-per-unit way of thinking?
- How can we get paid for the additional value we deliver?
- How do we design the offerings, the revenue models andthe pricing when we integrate forward and start to deliver services, often based on the installed base and with applications of embedded systems, sensors, M2M, IoT, Big Data, and the internet?
What you need to learn:
- Formulate unique offerings and value propositions
- Developing prices – an unconventional take on how to change the price levels customers are willing to pay
- Identifying value: improve both margins and customer satisfaction
- Target customer profiles to improve hit-rates and reduce quotation/sales costs
- The business process and how to ‘marry’ product development and sales
- Marketing and communicating your value message, including quotations
- Negotiation and contracts – commercial best practises
Methods for strategic challenges help small islands save water
Methodology for strategic challenges used to save water
KTH Executive School has developed a methodology to help our participants to solve strategic challenges. The same methodology was recently used together with eights small islands that all face the challenge to reduce their water footprints and save 25% of the fresh water.
One part of the methodology was “Six Thinking Hats”
Leading Innovation, the most essential course this fall – Apply now!
One of the biggest challenges for all mature Swedish companies is how to become or stay innovative. To address this issue KTH Executive School has handpicked the best from academia and industry to a three-day course in Leading Innovation.
The course combines theories with hands-on methodology and address:
– Innovation Management
– Innovation Action
– Innovation Leadership
The course takes place on November 29-30 and December 14. Read more and apply here.
The death or the rebirth of universities in a time of disruption?
The higher education system is facing a time of disruption. The rapid development of Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs, has generated a lively debate. The effect on the existing higher education is in focus. Can MOOCs really be an alternative to face to face classroom teaching? Despite this legitimate scepticism, the number of universities offering MOOCs increase at a rapid pace. As MOOCs went from an experimental phase to become well established in 2012, more and more universities jumped on the bandwagon. Some clearly see an opportunity, while others seem to join without a clearly formulated strategy. Jumping or not, all universities are today expected to have an answer to the question: What are your plans within the MOOC area?
The disruptive innovation theory indicates that we can expect dramatic changes
So far, the phenomenon follows the disruptive innovation theory by Clayton Christensen: incumbents regard the new service to be of a much lower quality; the new innovation target underserved or new customer segments; the service is offered at much lower price levels; the offer is less complete but holds the potential to develop fast meeting demands of present customers, “ordinary students” in this case. The disruptive innovation theory indicates that we can expect dramatic changes within the higher education industry. The core of the disruptive nature of MOOCs is, compared to ordinary face to face higher education, the very limited incremental cost to add one additional student along with that the service is ubiquitous. These two characteristics combined, lay the foundation for a very fast penetration. This pattern has earlier been seen for other internet based business models challenging established industries. Läs mer
