When enough people agree on one direction, the market enters a trend that could sustain itself for many years. The cardinal concept that makes the free market run is simple: supply and demand.
What is happening in the economy will be reflected in the stock market as certain businesses and industries boom and investors all want a piece of the pie, leading to increased demand for shares. If the economy shrinks, investors scurry to sell their shares which drives down prices as supply exceeds demand. These market forces and the stocks that follow their lead permeate every industry in the country.
The pandemic created a window for digitally enabled service providers to take advantage of the incumbent competition’s inability to address new customer pain points because it would destroy their current business.
Although you can never predict with certainty when a market will ignite, it is essential that you understand in detail the specific ecosystem factors that impact your target customers’ willingness and ability to adopt your solution.
Which companies will survive?
The companies that will survive and thrive will have three things in common:
- The pre-existence of enabling technologies
- Regulation on their side – think of telemedicine and the most recent updates to the Cures Act
- Ecosystems & Marketplaces – how we interact with technology and ability to personalize outcomes
Unlike in the traditional economy, where companies require expensive physical investments to build out their business models, in the digital world, companies can grow rapidly with a smart combination of data, software, and ecosystem strategies.
With platforms we often think in layers; each layer building on each other and the interfaces mostly being at the boundaries. The benefit of being a platform company and not a product company is that it inherently allows you to connect ecosystems of developers and internal and third-party applications leading to:
- Interoperability and efficiency issues
- Ability to grow faster and scale better
- Personalization
- Self-sufficient community requiring less resources
- Lower end-user costs
- Speed of disruption and increased innovation
Digitization and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, and infrastructure services have not yet attained their full disruptive potential. More and more individual user and transactional data will become connected with different platform services and functions, with the potential to generate positive and negative outcomes.
The implications of COVID-19 have accelerated digital adoption. The increasing use of technology to work, play, and stay connected have shaped new digital habits. Now is the time to reset, pivot, and think big to transform your business operations to match the new digital expectations that have emerged. Our focus is to help businesses understand evolving consumer needs, so you can prepare for the future and respond to signals of recovery, as and when they surface.
