Digitization: Watershed for Enterprises

Dec 05-2019   

Prof. Chen Chunhua, Dean of BiMBA Business School, revealed her favorite question for entrepreneurs at a recent summit in China by Harvard Business Review: Is your business model time-related?

If the answer is no, she said, she would be very worried, for it means the entrepreneur still lingers in the Industrial Age and hasn’t entered the Digital Era yet.

Her speech, Stride into the New Era of Digitalized Industries, presented her diagnosis and prescription for digitization. Companies have to digitize simply because the clients and consumers have lead in digitization. Chinese coffee-chain LuckIn can serve a good cup of coffee at anytime and anywhere thanks to empowerment by digitization. Digitization has brought about consumption changes at a much larger scale than we thought.

Over the last seven years, Prof. Chen has conducted in-depth research into 23 leading companies in digitization drive. One of her conclusions is that the key challenge for digitization is time; the time span available to keep one’s competitive advantages has been drastically narrowed down.

Digitization has unleashed the fourth industrial revolution. In contrast to the previous ones where machines and man worked along side, digitization is likely to see machines replacing man. The changes are afoot.

Companies need to undertake three fundamental adjustments: One, re-calibrate cognition and stop using traditional logic to analyze industrial and corporate transformation; Two, shift strategy from competitive logic to symbiotic one, so as to re-define market space; Three, overhaul organizational management by focusing on holistic management, opening up boundaries and facilitating collaboration.