EAE News
Technological Entrepreneurship: Strategic Challenges and Key Technologies
10 de July de 2020
Technological Entrepreneurship: Disruption, Competition, Incremental and Technology
How can we understand technological entrepreneurship in the year 2020? What are the main strategic challenges in relation to competitiveness and which technologies should we keep in mind? In view of the importance of this issue in the modern world, on 7th May, the Director of EAE’s Master in International Business and CEO of Elsebits, Marc Sansó, expertly addressed the most important points of this issue and gave a handy, precise overview for understanding the multiple dimensions involved in today’s technological entrepreneurship.
After explaining how industries operate and the roles of the different agents, Sansó contextualized business competition over the last few years, which helped us gain a better understanding of how technological entrepreneurship works.
“Nowadays, everything is faster, the cycles of disruption, industries are scaled based on demand and there is an economy of overall winners”, explained the Director. Moreover, he discussed the essential features of the modern industrial sector, such as asymmetric competition, the emergence of new professional profiles and the greater technological impact.
Central ideas of how industries function
In terms of the central ideas that we must bear in mind to understand how industries work, Sansó highlighted 4:
1 - Disruption
As far as the CEO of Elsebits is concerned, disruption is the main pillar of competitive strategy, as it is essential both in terms of anticipating changes and adapting to new environments. “Disruption is generated in response to inefficiencies and with the development of technological advances that enable us to overcome this inefficiencies”, explained Sansó. “Therefore, it is essential to understand the relationship between technological evolution and the way we approach traditional inefficiencies in an industry”.
How is a disruption generated in an industry?
In response to this question, the Director described 3 waves of disruption that provide a model and guide for all companies experiencing this process:
First wave: “This occurs when the firstly highly technological competitors emerge. The industry experiences a profound shock and traditional competitors have to adapt. Prices fall, which also generate pressure”.
Second wave: : “Competition becomes aggressive and strategies are imitated. In turn, this generates erosion and no progress is made so, in effect, the digital strategy tends to be limited to an operational response”.
Third wave: “This third phase is far more aggressive and disruptive, with strategies that have a real impact. Companies that reach this phase and have not fallen by the wayside along the way have survived the cycles and will start to see results”, he explained.
2 - Incremental
The second central idea mentioned by the Director was incremental strategies, referring to the capacity to improve the most conventional operating models, as well as optimizing models that help to provide solutions for customers.
3 - Technology
Thirdly, Sansó focused on technology, which forms the basis of entrepreneurship, disruption and all modern industrial changes. “The development of technologies is not linear, but rather progressive. As such, companies that invest in technology have to adapt to their own financial capacities and understand that new technologies do not generate revenue immediately, but rather after a period of development processes”.
To understand the relationship between competitive disruption, the evolution of a technology and capacity of different startups to start to monetize this technology, Sansó recommended using the Gartner cycle.
In addition, he listed the technologies that are going to account for the main flows of investment and have the greatest impact on production capacity:
- 5G Technologies
- Payments + Digital currencies
- Quantum computing
- Quantum physics applied to the Internet
- Biomedical research
- Edge computing and Tiny AI
- Technology related to adapting to and mitigating climate change
4 - Competition
Last but not least, the Director discussed the issue of competition, emphasizing, as he did at the start of the conference, that competition is currently determined by the reduction in disruption cycles, the economy of overall winners such as Google and Facebook, and a paradigm shift in which industries are now scaled based on demand.
After explaining the main points to get a better understanding of technological entrepreneurship, the Director of Master in International Business de EAE se dedicó a responder las preguntas de los alumnos e interesados que seguían la conferencia a través de LinkedIn Live.