New technologically innovative transport company Uber have turned the taxi industry upside down. Tech expert Robert Scoble explains what happened.

Uber disrupt an industry

They have to be scared that they are going to be put out of business. You better be paranoid. Things like Uber came out four years ago and now it's everywhere. You need to understand the innovators that are changing your business. Uber knows where you are standing, that's why it serves you better than a taxi company, they have your credit card details and we can talk to each other. He doesn't have my real phone number but he can message and call me through and app. Our briefing Uber Disruption – The reality of innovative technology   has more information on Uber and more expert discussion on industry disruption.

Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing is the latest in a series of technological developments that have affected the value of human ability. Graeme Codrington discusses the development in this video.

Computers have the advantage

About 100 years ago if you wanted to be quite successful in the world it would have been very clever for you to be quite physically fit. Because in the industrial age, as before that in the agrarian age, in the age of farming the people who either owned the land or owned the factories or worked on the land or worked in the factories, they were the people who were in charge. Those were your assets, physical ability. What we’ve done over the last 100 years is replaced peoples’ physical, the physical needs in terms of what we need from them physically with machines, you know, the combined harvester and the container and the robots in factories. And then for the last 50 years we have ploughed our resources, as human beings we’ve become clever by being clever. We have moved into the information age where your mental ability is what sets you apart from other people. Now, somebody who was gifted at birth, not by my choice, but was gifted with a reasonable intelligence and a nice IQ and a middle class family that could get me through university, that’s been brilliant. Because I’ve been able to use my brain to make money, but unfortunately right now computers are about to do to me what robots and machines did to my farm working, factory working uncles and grandparents. They’re about to make me redundant because they can think faster than I can. They can think more than I can. They don’t need to take a break to eat or sleep or all the other things I like to do. Inside Finance TV has more fantastic video by Graeme Codrington and other experts on the future of business.

Business strategy models have to adaptable to future disruptions and developments. In this TV show Keith Coats of TomorrowToday discusses strategic thinking for leaders.

Business strategy models in an unpredictable world

Leaders have to be future-focused. Levi right now have a great slogan, which says ‘the future has left, so go forth’. Jim Data is a retired futurist and he articulated that past thinking amongst futurists was something like this … I might have some of the percentages slightly wrong but the rough ratios is 80% of our tomorrows would be built on what futurists call continuations, so if you want to understand tomorrow, look at the DNA of today, 80%. 15% would be cycles – economic, political social cycles – and 5% would be novelties. Now, in the futurist language a novelty is the curve ball, the unexpected, the 9/11, the thing that very few people could foresee. I’ll preface that with past thinking. Current thinking amongst futurists has inverted that table, turned it on its head. They are telling us that up to 80% of our tomorrow is what they call novelty, we simply do not know. Now, even if they’re half correct I wouldn’t go to war over those percentages, it’s the trend here we’re looking at, that the bulk of our tomorrows is going to be a surprise, going to be the unexpected, the unpredictable. The question then becomes how do you build continuity in that? What does the organisation that learns how to build planes in the air, as it were, look like in that context? For one thing it renders redundant strategic planning, you cannot plan your way into that kind of uncertainty. We need companies today who understand the emphasis needs to be on strategic thinking and at all levels of the organisation, this is a leadership agenda.

Inside Finance is very interested in business strategy models and the future business world. Browse our video player for related content.

Having the right business assets can make you a lot of money if an interested acquirer gets in touch. In this TV show BeatThatQuote.com’s John Paleomylites discusses selling to Google.

The right business assets

There wasn't anything specifically that we did with a view to selling it to Google. Google approached us. I the year to Jan '11 revenues of the company were around 14m, with a reasonable profit. Subsequently as the company would have grown probably in the subsequent year probably around 20m. So there was still a fair amount of growth in the business. I think there was probably a few reasons why it was BeatThatQuote.com. In e of them would be down to the technology choices that we made, I think it would be accurate to say that BeatThatQoute of all of the UK comparison sites was the only one that used open source technologies to deliver it's service. I think one of the other reasons is that BeatThatQoute never really developed a brand. Our route to market was through direct marketing and through white label, which is essentially putting our content into other people's brands. Whereas pretty much all of the other aggregators were branded, and given that Google really has the best brand in the industry there was no need for them to pay over the odds to acquire a branded comparison site. the most important lesson I think that any entrepreneur really needs to learn and to understand is to negotiate the best deal that they can possibly get. Keep exploring Inside Finance for more TV shows about business assets and similar subjects.

Business innovation skills need to be harnessed in the right environment. In this TV show Simon La Fosse discusses government helping entrepreneurs grow.

Entrepreneurial business innovation skills are valuable

The heat you see on the west coast of America that is leading to massive salary inflation and people moving all too frequently to try to be able to build these businesses, mean that you’re seeing west coast US businesses saying “We should be setting up in, not setting up a peripheral business in London but maybe we should be setting up in London”.  The same with some of the Nordic countries, so there’s some really exciting stuff happening, that I think has proper momentum and, you know, I’m not a great fan of government intervention, I don’t know whether you call it government intervention or just enabling things to happen, but I think they should be credited with creating an environment that is much more conducive to the growth of entrepreneurialism in a time in our lives which is so exciting, this is, you know, akin to the industrial revolution, it’s just the digital revolution, and I feel lucky to be a part of it and I’m hanging on, I’m trying to keep up with what’s going on.

Inside Finance will continue to produce great TV shows about entrepreneurial business and business innovation skills.

 

Disruptive innovation is well known to have had an huge impact in the music industry. In this TV show Graeme Codrington discusses what happened and how other industries can learn a lesson from it.

Disruptive innovation in music

The best examples of structural change are those industries that we can already see have been impacted by the digital revolution.  Your best examples there come out of the entertainment industries.  So music for example, is an industry that just is in chaos at the moment, I mean they don’t know how to make money anymore, they don’t know where their income streams come from.  They’re the only industry in the world who are currently suing their own clients, you know it’s crazy.  But they really don’t know how to make money at the moment.  And we’re going to see a lot more chaos in the music industry because they’re not innovating, they’re not working out new ways of getting income, they’re not working out new ways of connecting with clients.  And of course because of how they’ve handled themselves over the last decade or so, most of their customers are very comfortable ripping them off and downloading stuff for free and so on.  So it’s a mess.  But it’s easy to look at that industry and of course DVDs and the movies industry are following close behind them and close behind them are the newspapers and the magazines.  And it’s easy to laugh at them, but every other industry has the potential to be digitised in pretty much the same way.  So even the medical profession which you’d think, well, that’s not going to really going to be digitised, it can be done at a digital distance.  The type of advice you get from your general practitioner, you can get via Skype from anyone in a call centre anywhere.  You might not prefer it that way, but it is accessible that way.  And so you think of any industry you like and this digitisation has the potential to disrupt your industry as much as it has disrupted the entertainment industry in the last decade.

Inside finance will continue to follow the impacts of disruptive innovation and the discussions around it. We have more great shows from Graeme Codrington.

Business strategy models will involve pre-empting business disruptions and being ready to deal with them. Some issues will be more sensitive than others. In this TV show Matthew Haswell discusses sick pay policy.

Good business strategy models pre-empt difficult situations

The pure cost in terms of sick pay to be paid to someone who is off long term sick is very much reliant on the sick pay policy that the employer has, if they only pay statutory sick pay that’s obviously going to be a fairly low cost, if they have a promise to maintain that individuals salary for say three months, six months, obviously the cost will be higher. What we are finding, particularly in smaller companies is that some employers only tend to think about these kind of strategies when the event occurs. Now it’s very difficult if you don’t actually have a sick pay policy to suddenly try and make one up when someone goes off sick and it’s also very difficult to just say ‘Right we’re going to stop paying you full pay after a month’ if that’s not in contracts of employment or that’s not something that’s been communicated to staff prior to the event of sickness.

Keep watching Inside Finance for more expert insight into good business strategy models and similar subjects.

Business strategy models can be put in place to prevent employee absence, as Matthew Haswell discusses in this TV show.

Absence prevention business strategy models

Well the first side, the first thing to do is try and import procedures that are actually going to prevent absence in the first place. Now that doesn’t necessarily relate to immediately spending money, that can be a kind of training and an approach basis. A lot of sickness is recurring, getting to the background of why that sickness is occurring, getting managers to be able to talk to their staff about sickness and absence and looking at patterns, the way sickness is recorded can actually throw up into light certain patterns of illness, it may be from a certain department has reoccurring illnesses, it may even be within a department those under a particular manager have certain recurring absences. That’s something that isn’t exactly a huge cost but it is just a procedural change. And also the culture and value system of the employer has a relation between that and sickness absence. Inside Finance is very interested in innovative business strategy models and will continue to bring you expert discussion on the subject.

Digital technology is growing and growing. In this TV show Nigel Huddleston explains why the future of Google+ is exciting for business and pleasure.

Social digital technology

We’re really excited about Google Plus because as a social platform it’s not a standalone, we’re integrating it with search. But it’s really exciting because we’ve not only got more than 400 million unique users, but they’re using it in a really creative way that maybe they aren’t with other social platforms. The video content capability is great, showing photos of course is really, really important. But what we’re seeing from an advertiser’s angle as well is that they’re able to example, link to their Google Plus page in the advertising. We’re seeing a five to ten percent uplift in click through rates, to the link to the Google Plus page. So that’s really important, we call that social extensions. So there’s a meaningful impact from an advertiser’s side in terms of having that Google Plus social platform.

Keep an eye on Inside Finance if you are interested in social digital technology. There will be more TV shows from knowledgeable business insiders like Nigel Huddleston.

 

Digital generation, digital natives and generation Y are all references to the young people who have grown up with technology. They are now reaching the age where they are entering industry. Graeme Codrington discusses the significance of this.

The digital generation born at the same time as the internet

Technology is obviously a huge driver of change in our world. Recent advances in computing power have really brought computers up to a level where they can now deliver on what our imaginations have been promising for a few decades, and it really just is in the last literally 18 - 24 months that computing power speed size and price have all come together to mean we can really do what we want to do with computers and now we are set up for the next decade of change, but in addition to the raw computing power, it's also the people, we have got a group of people we like to call digital natives who are entering the world of work, these are the young people that were born in that remarkable year of change 1989, the year communism died and the Berlin wall came and Tiananmen Square happened. But also 1989 was the year the internet as we know it was started. Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and web pages where born, and young people who were born in 1989 were born in the same year that the internet was born and started working for you last year, and they've brought their computers with them, and so it's this combination of computing power and a new generation of digital natives arriving in the workplace at precisely the same time, its going to cause huge disruptive change.

Inside Finance TV will continue to follow the impact of the digital generation entering the world of work.