Future Business Models for High Performance: Where Technology and the Multi-Polar World Meet

This year’s report, From Global Connection to Global Orchestration: Future Business Models for High Performance Where Technology and the Multi-Polar World Meet, focuses on the new economic models created by the convergence of technology developments and the rise of the multi-polar world.

As the global economy begins to show signs of recovery, attention is shifting to the following long-term trends:

• The rise of a multi-polar world: As globalization enters a new phase, economic power is diffused across geographic borders. Recent events have demonstrated the resilience and growing importance of emerging markets—and companies originating in these economies are likewise playing an ever more important role in the global economy.
  
  
• The maturation of IT: The coming together of cloud services, collaborative computing, mobile communications and other emerging technologies is creating new options for businesses in all regions. IT’s ability to help organizations respond to and reinforce growth in emerging markets adds weight to the shift toward economic multi-polarity.

Two major strands of research inform this report. First, Accenture analyzed the interaction between IT and globalization, using secondary data sources, Accenture’s own experience and the work of the Accenture Institute for High performance and Accenture Technology Labs.

Second, Accenture commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit to identify how companies are evaluating and responding to developments in IT and globalization. This research took place in October and November 2009, and the 420 respondents were all senior business leaders.

The research identified six market-making forces:

• Co-production between companies and their customers or suppliers is blurring traditional boundaries within industry value chains.
  
  
• New businesses that use IT to build new bridges between producers and customers are emerging.
  
  
• Changes in the capability, reach and cost of IT are enabling new forms of business-to-business commerce.
  
  
• Technology is unleashing consumer-to-consumer content as like-minded individuals share information and opinion about products and services—often in an open and global forum where the objective is not profit, but an increase in the knowledge or economic welfare of participants.
  
  
• IT is allowing consumers to participate in peer-to-peer markets for the cooperative production of goods and services in tandem with other consumers.
  
  
• Individuals are collaborating electronically to engage in cooperative consumption.

These market-making forces have big implications for businesses and governments that are in pursuit of high performance. Surprisingly, though, only 11 percent of companies surveyed believe they are significantly advanced in their strategic response.

In other words, there is a large opportunity for companies that see the imperative to move beyond global connectedness toward a more proactive orchestration of these new forces. Those doing so are unlocking business improvement in three areas:

• Extension: Developing current business in new areas.
• Transformation: Growing new business in new areas.
• Optimization: Achieving operational excellence in current business activities.

Orchestrating market-making forces is complex. Accenture’s research has identified two hallmarks of success:

• Actively seek greater insight. Tomorrow’s high-performance businesses will exhibit unusually high levels of business intelligence, putting in place infrastructure with which they can constantly amass and analyze data to glean valuable insight. A passion for data-driven continuous improvement will become a fundamental tenet of a high-performance organization’s culture.
  
  
• Develop deep and wide networks with consumers, entrepreneurs and other businesses. By connecting to consumers through social computing and advanced analytics, they will undertake an open dialogue that directs product and service enhancement while building loyalty.

By opening up to external entrepreneurs and businesses, they can co-opt the experience and capabilities of others to develop new, innovative solutions at low cost. And by divesting some in-house functions to external service providers, such as cloud owners and horizontal service providers, they can increase efficiency and reduce costs.