Trend of Specializing

Direction now also leads to specializing because of open market that advertise individualism and uniqueness, peoples nowadays are skillful and knowledgeable enough to do whatever possibly matters where they do not need to spend money to get what they need, they could perform on their own. First, what mean by specializing anyway? Look backward of 20 years ago in production era where major market players and demand are on products, things created from raw materials and we have products. Well, life moves on where peoples see the importance of innovating technology to outstand from the crowd and win in this competitive market. Some smarter ones they creates niche products that not even public realizing it that they needs one; Yet, they successfully market their niche product by educated the market that “You” need one. And what next era will be? Imagine demanding customers will never disappear and they will gradually increase their expectation. So as a service provider or manufacturer, you would need to gradually improve your product and service, look into every possible areas to identify where can outperform better than your competitor. That’s where you eventually emphasizing on specialize area. And consumer expectation will be towards your specialty and expertise. Another higher level from specialty and expertise, people may decide which to buy based on branding. Well, that’s another huge topic to talks about.

Take a very good example, IT industry that I am currently worked on. You may realize as well more and more processes and more specialize/ specific areas were being identified such as incident management in IT service industry to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations. To delight a customers become more challenging, one single mistake could possibly leads to a company big trouble. And that’s where many specific processes and management are in place to make sure things are in control and meet expectation as well. Jobs like consultants, specialist or expert are exist compare to last time no such demand or jobs exist. Perhaps in the future cleaner could be a high paid job with job title cleaning specialist/ cleaning consultant/ advisor J In fact, its happening now already….

Today hire a plumber may cost you few hundreds for a job. But in the future may be a few hundreds per hour just like lawyer or doctor nowadays. In fact in some areas over at developed countries already happens these. More specific, a plumber may be call as sanitary specialist in the future. So, self-employed volume would gradually increase in very near future and more people would value skills and knowledge than anything else. Drawbacks of these trends might be poorer people might suffer. There might be huge groups of people who can’t effort it and this eventually leads to trends of DIY. Certainly the DIY market would rise, with open source and informative on internet, people could just grab whatever knowledge they want on DIY. Moreover, many internet portal that provides the facilities that accommodate them to perform whatever DIY projects that possible, for instance DIY handicrafts, DIY web sites, DIY computer programs, DIY designers, DIY draftsman, DIY plumber, DIY electrician, etc…. This will cause great impact to small and medium industries. Imagine in the very near future, almost all people who knows to create own web sites, write little programs to ease their life, designer of their own, song writer of their own, everyone could sing well and plays well too. Nevertheless, existing industry will still survive as there are still groups of people who can afford it and willing to pay for people to do for them. In fact, it’s a huge group of people as human nature of lazy and ignorant. For instance, billboard list with top singer will still; May be you score 1 million fans today but tomorrow all fans goes to other singer. It’s a tuff game back then.

Ideas that matter most....

Prequote: "Out of sudden, some thoughts running in my mind about business and market again that I would like to share. Although it’s a bit off my blog’s topics, but business is something about imagination and creativity, don’t you think? So I think it’s relevant tho… :)"

With nowadays competitive market and getting tuff to satisfying customers which now evolves to another level “delighting customers” because basically retaining a customer become a greatest challenge now. So in order to remain profitable, companies which eventually needs to evolve their business model and focus area to survive OR find ways to keep on delighting customers.
Big companies such as IBM and Google, they invest lots of money on innovation and encouraging ideas as they aware retaining business and keep find ways to delight customers is not going to lead them to long term surviving and remains at top. IBM willing to let go their personal computing department (sell to Lenovo) is a good move because although that’s part of core business for IBM, relatively they have to let go as company focus ultimately is all about profit not keep on who you are.

So to be innovative, rises demand of ideas and comments. That’s why leading companies are willing to dump lots of money investing on innovation because they see it important. Partly due to open market and globalization, to get in touch direct to end-consumer are relatively easy with nowadays technology. Therefore, this contributed also to encourage most companies go straight to public to get ideas. Instead as past old business model that goes distributor/business partner/reseller then to end user. And towards management and leadership, this leads to open-candor management (encourage staff to speak out and discuss), prioritize voice and dignity from employee is a winning leadership strategy nowadays. Hahahha… In Buddhism said, back to the seed to find a solution (Well, its law of nature). Hahaha… suddenly like off topic already but its true, to be top of the trends and foresee the trends by seeing current state and applying law of nature could actually predict some part of future in general.

From these trends, now the focus/questions go to
1) How to encourage public to share ideas, voice out their valuable comments?
2) How to conduct these efficiently?

From these questions and focus created another demand market, obviously it’s a potential business to be. Just very lately, a few groups who are aware this trend and demand already started these business such as http://www.redesignme.com/, http://www.kluster.com/. Ideas will be, oh in fact already a sellable product, demand and value of it will tremendously increase in very near future. These trends also encourage research companies becoming more important and demanding, not only R&D but research companies who do survey and collecting comments from companies. These “Crown-sourcing” would become a hit and certainly will impact all industry on ways of operating. So for companies to survive, multi-layers of business model and management systems would eventually need to evolve. But conducting change is relatively challenging, imagine companies with thousands staff and layers of departments. Its real tuff! Ha, another demand rises again, not sure you have seen it? I’ll share in my next topics, time to eat now….