Pay close attention to the trends going on in your industry and with your customers. Based on current trends happening, what future trends can you identify? If you can accurately pinpoint where your industry or customers will be in the next few months or years (or what your customers will want), you can de-commoditize your offering and get that business.
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Posts Tagged ‘Knowledge’
Follow Trends To Decommoditize Your Product
Knowledge Era Enterprises
Over the next 15 years, organizations worldwide will create new economic value by converting information into knowledge, sharing that knowledge internally to increase its value, and then selling it in non-competing industries to a global client base. Organizations will want their intellectual property (IP) formalized, captured, and leveraged to produce assets of a higher value. This shift in focus is already spawning a fast growing new industry that helps organizations do just that. Businesses of all sizes and from all industry segments will use Internet-based technology to leverage the talents, knowledge and wisdom of employees in new and exciting ways to create high margin products and services in this decade and beyond.
Three components are necessary to begin the process leveraging and profiting from IP:
1. Everyone in the organization must see the tremendous opportunity and added value in going beyond the current activity of converting data into information, to higher levels of value by creating and delivering knowledge and wisdom, which clients can quickly act upon.
2. Everyone in the organization must see that its technology infrastructure and organization are the keys to unlock the vast wealth the Knowledge Era has to offer, both for the organization and its clients.
3. Everyone in the organization must see the importance of his or her own participation as essential to building a strong foundation for the enhancement, sharing and delivery of knowledge.
Technology is no longer a barrier to creating a Knowledge Era enterprise. The key is to see the tremendous opportunity that exists right now, and take action.
Leveraging Intellectual Capital
Working with executives at the Mayo Clinic in the early ’90s, I asked them to do what I ask many of my clients to do today – and that is to look at what I call the Visible Future®. At that time, this was not something they wanted to do. Why? Because to them it was depressing. Indeed, their visible future included decreasing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements and increasing losses in their emergency rooms. So my suggestion to them was this: “Why don’t you sell your knowledge?”
The result was a CD which could be used by people any time, day or night, to determine, for example, whether their child’s rash and fever required a trip to the emergency room or could be treated with aspirin. The Mayo Clinic put a $100 price tag on the product, and in the first year it sold 670,000 copies.
A side benefit was that, by expanding their services to offer a knowledge-based product, they began to develop a new and powerful 21st century brand in the marketplace. They not only created new value and new revenue, but with the subsequent advent of the Internet, their name recognition became international.
Are you leveraging the intellectual capital in your organization?
