Collaborative Collectives
Adapting to Disruptive Technologies
Take a deep breath. Feel the air expanding your lungs as you breathe in deeper and deeper, your body working to receive life-giving oxygen. Now breathe out and feel your lungs contract as you push the air and toxins out.
If you are a traditional corporation, you would be designed to breathe in continuously, expanding your workforce and productivity for about 7 years until you collapse in exhaustion from a recession, and then start to breathe in new contracts all over again. As you expand your corporation and begin diversifying production across the world stage it seems as if you can go on expanding your corporate lungs forever. If you are taking a deep breath, and someone startles you, you breathe out quickly which can be quite painful – this is similar to the impact of disruptive technologies.
Disruptive Technologies
A disruptive technology is some new form of technology that is invented and applied to an industry or across the consumer base which completely transforms how we do something. The smartphone, for example, transformed not only our business and interactions, but everything from education to socializing to geotracking and a sense of convergence between the digital and physical worlds.
Businesses who want to reach their consumers more effectively are now redoing their websites to be more responsive to both device and viewer, as well as working in new forms of marketing through content, mobile advertising and social media. If you have a large corporation with big budgets, transformation, although often slow, will eventually catch up. Small and medium-sized businesses, similar to small boats that can turn easily to avoid problems, have the ability to change quickly if they are dedicated to their market.
Yet, in a network society based on informationalism, change is continuous, which creates a marketplace that is constantly in a state of flux. If you are a small business owner and you try to keep up with all these fluid transformations in society based on technology and information, it is exhausting and almost impossible. Collaboration is the key to adapting to disruptive technologies.
Collaborative Collectives
Now imagine you about to take a deep breath again, but this time you look around and see people you choose to work with getting ready to breathe at different times. As more and more solopreneurs start working in a project-based, virtual environment, collaboration begins to become a more attainable solution to change and marketplace demand.
The initial model is simple and adaptive. If you can manage the project on your own and can provide the best possible level of quality and service, then you are able to work effectively. What happens when you get 10 contracts at once? Can you possibly do everything at once quickly and effectively? By collaborating with other complimentary small businesses you can, rather than contracting out, work together. If you are a social media expert and see your business expanding while you have customers asking for more services, wouldn’t it make sense to connect to small businesses providing website design, marketing, graphic design, tech support, hosting, blogging and any other service you can offer? In this way, the small business can offer a wide variety of services similar to a large company. Like your lungs when you breathe in, you expand taking in the help of each other’s networks and when the contracts are complete, you contract again back to your original small business. It is the interconnection of complimentary talents and creativity that is essential to your collaborative collective.
Integrated Networks
Similar to the Internet, you become a network of networks. You have your contacts and service providers you have always worked with, but now you are collaborating with other companies who compliment the services you provide and bring with them extensive networks. Soon a global impact for your small business is no longer out of reach. And if you work virtually and produce information-based products, things become that much more efficient.
The companies that I am involved with have had great success with this model of business. Some use commissions, others have completely eliminated the commission structures and promote each collaborator’s company instead, so there is plenty of work and paid projects to go around the collective. Without commissions, your pricing can also be much more competitive. Adaptive elements are built into each small business so they work together, continue to learn and develop, and support each other across the projects. This model of a corporate collaborating collective becomes flexible and adaptive to any disruptive technology since change is built into its core structure.
Take a deep breath again, secure in the knowledge that you can adapt, transform, expand and contract based on the every-changing marketplace and information-based network society.
