‘5S’ User Services in Digital Age

Mar 07-2021   

In a digital age, innovation is about the rematching and recombination of information. Users, fee paying or not, are the most important keystone and the core element of the corporate ecosystem. User services in the digital age consist of five basic factors: Search, Suggest, Seal, Subscribe, and Synchronize, or ‘5S’, as Prof. Ma Hao of the NSD sums it up in an article that appears in Tsinghua Management Review.

Prof. Ma specializes in business strategic management and chairs the academic committee of BiMBA Business School. The 5S framework is inspired by current phenomena and contexts, he writes. The article traces the evolution of Google and Amazon and sheds light on their continuous business innovations based on information recombination and their growth from a single business to a corporate behemoth.

Search and Suggest aim to accurately satisfy or induce user demand. Seal the Deal focuses on the close-circuit design of business activities, so as to keep revenue and profit within a company’s ecosystem. Subscribe ensures repetition and duration of demand along a chronological line, while Synchronize is tasked with matching different user channels and interfaces at a specific time point.

Prof. Ma reminds that digitalization can hardly conquer all – some traditions and ways of doing things are likely to persist in certain milieus and communities. Some people might insist on vinyl and not digital music, and some might be offended at high-brow restaurants when presented with a menu on iPad. The essence of the digital age lies not in digits or digitalization per se, but rather in intelligence and accuracy.

The 5S framework can even be applicable to the pre-digital age, for every S has taken on a life longer than the digital age. For example, Search and Suggest are products of the analogue age, and matching of channels - both temporal and spatial - has long been a challenge for brick-and mortar stores. What matters is the inherent logic.