Marketing Technology

Here’s a quickie for a Friday night, courtesy of December’s McKinsey Quarterly. James Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague have identified the eight business technology trends to watch over the next decade:

1. Distributing cocreation (or ‘wisdom of the in-crowd’?)
   Outsource innovation to business partners that work together in networks
2. Using consumers as innovators
   Tap into the new mood of customer engagement for economic benefit
3. Tapping into a world of talent
   Competitive advantage will shift to companies that master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks
4. Extracting more value from interactions
   Technology tools that promote tacit interactions will become just as ubiquitous as the computer itself
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
   Companies still have headroom to automate repetitive tasks
6. Unbundling production from delivery
   Use technology to offer other companies access to parts of your business
7. Putting more science into management
   Technology can help managers exploit ever-increasing amounts of data to make smarter decisions
8. Making businesses from information
   Accumulated pools of data are the raw data for new information-based business opportunities.

As they say, “smart managers should start doing their homework now.” I like to think that we’re doing some of these already, but we still have a long, long way to go, both inside our own business and as an industry as a whole.