How Alibaba, Android and Airbnb change the geometry of business

A checklist for creating successful digital marketplaces

One of the central concepts I talk about on this blog is the shift from linear business models to networked business models: from Pipes to Platforms. The business priorities while building these two contrasting forms of businesses are very different, and I’ve explored that in detail in an earlier essay here.

We also note that this shift has already happened in several industries. I explore that in detail in the essay here. (I would highly recommend reading both essays in tandem even if you’ve read them separately earlier.)

Media has already been transformed by this shift and become social. Telecom has been transformed by the explosion of the app economy. Professional services of all kinds are being transformed with the rise of the peer-to-peer sharing economy. And I believe that significant opportunities exist in the manufacturing and traditional goods industries for platforms to come in and create new markets. The rise of the Maker Movement and the growing democratization of 3D printing will accelerate this shift further.

There are three fundamental changes that accompany every such shift in the industries that start getting transformed:
1. New networked markets get created
2. New sources of supply start to emerge
3. New consumption patterns are created

We looked at all these shifts in detail in the rise of YouTube, Airbnb, Upwork, and to a lesser extent, Kickstarter, in this essay here.

Feel Free to Share

To bring all of these concepts together into one cohesive whole, I want to share a keynote that I delivered earlier this year as the closing keynote at CrowdSourcingWeek 2014. I was invited to speak at the G20 Summit events in Brisbane last week and I shared a further more evolved point of view on how resource-intensive industries like oil and gas and mining will also change because of platforms and how new job creation will be spurred by the creation of new markets.

In this essay, I would like to share the first keynote from CrowdSourcing Week 2014. I hope to share the second set of thoughts from the G20 Summit events in the coming weeks. The video doesn’t incorporate the slides, but much of the talk should be self-explanatory.

Industries are getting transformed. While it’s important for startups to understand how things are changing, it’s, even more, important for the old guard to realize that the traditional rules of business do not apply anymore.

One of my constant endeavors through this blog is to address both sides and help share the message of how many of the fundamental rules of value creation in business have changed forever.

Tweetable Takeaways

The three key takeaways from the video, the new rules of business in a networked world:

The Ecosystem is the new Warehouse  Tweet

Community Management is the new HR  Tweet

The Network Effect is the new Scaling Strategy  Tweet