Being Reminded We Are In A Zero Distance World

Visual taken from the paper “The Zero Distance World” through Ericsson.

I downloaded a paper, written by Geoff Hollingworth, Head of Ericsson Cloud Marketing, Ericsson Evangelist, in collaboration with Jason Hoffman, Head of Product Area Cloud Infrastructure, Ericsson last year called “The Zero Distance World”

I came across it again this week, as I was busy re-organizing my files and references and I wanted to share parts of it, in quotes that I feel are fairly powerful

On checking, I saw that Geoff Hollingsworth has left Ericsson and when I went in search of this paper I got the message back “Page Requested, Cannot Be Found“. Annoying but let me press on and draw out some things that held my attention and why I am posting some of the points made.

Firstly we are often are told it is becoming a “zero-sum game” and so this “Zero Distance world” made me curious. So let me “pull out some points that I think resonate for me and hopefully for you. Continue reading

The dynamics within platform business models

Market dynamics have changed dramatically in the past few years. The concept of connected networks has been having an increasing impact on all industries and market sectors.

Specifically, the platform business model has been generating a significant dynamism that is hard to ignore recently. We are increasingly in need to scale as quickly as possible and by moving to the emphasis of platform capacity, helps this considerably.

Platforms require networks and the need to build ecosystems and the whole focus is on increasing engagement, or build this “capacity”. Connecting all this up can provide real scale. Building greater capacity, especially without adding to resources yields a greater return.

I feel the way we presently view scale, one presently linked far more to one single entity, one that is wanting to scale up their business model and that limits opportunities. I feel searching for new ‘capacity’ opens this up and takes us more towards the open, collaborative platform business model, where real growth seems to reside for our business futures. Continue reading

Have you got your digital twin strategy sorted out yet?

Gosh, where do you start on thinking through “digital twins”. The manufacturing industry is exploding with their digital twins to mimic their physical operations,

We have companies like Dassault who have been focusing on digital for many years taking a  specific focus on the human being and commercially releasing their “Living Heart”.

This “living heart” digital twin is the first realistic model of a human organ that actually accounts for electricity, mechanics and blood flow in the heart into a personalized full-dimensional model of the heart. Then users can practice and manipulate it, to place pacemakers, reverse chambers, cut out cross sections and run all sorts of hypothetical scenarios before the physical heart needs to be touched.

Then we have the digital twin that will learn all about you and what you do, think and work upon to provide you a closer replica of your daily life to help you. No, the digital twin is alongside us in multiple ways, it is not just a shadow in a mirror, mimicking all we do, in life and real time but it is working on finding better solutions to improve the actions being undertaken. It helps to predict, suggest and improve on our current activities.

Now stop and absorb that, please. The digital twin takes intelligence to a new level to mimic and then also predicts performance, based on the real-world performance you are feeding back into it. Continue reading