Marcel Rossouw | Group Director | Fjord Johannesburg | mail me |
The next three years do not look like the new normal they look like the never normal. It is not a pessimistic way of describing it but a realistic way, and it means that we need to think long and hard about planning and strategy and execution. There will be a lot of strategic thinking wastage over the next three years, and in our view, we cannot spend enough time studying how people are thinking and how they are reacting to the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and technology.
For the 13th year running, Fjord – design and innovation from Accenture Interactive, has forecasted trends that we believe will manifest at the intersection of business, technology and design. We have revisited the Fjord Trends 2020[1] under a different lens in view of the current climate and changes that businesses are facing as a result of COVID-19. We found that the pandemic has accelerated the impact of these seven trends on business, people and society.
The seven trends in the South African context
Our initial study, released at the end of 2019, draws upon the collective thinking of Fjord’s 1,200+ designers and developers in 33 studios around the world. The annual crowdsourced report is based on first-hand observations, evidenced-based research and client work, to produce a globally diverse set of trends that continues to reflect the collaborative journey between business, society, design innovation and technology.
The pandemic has accelerated our adoption and collaboration with technology. The new normal looks more like the never normal and presents exciting opportunities for business to embrace innovation using design thinking and technology.
Trend 1: The many faces of growth
A fundamental reset button has been pressed by the pandemic and placed purpose at the centre of the lens. Capitalism is facing a mid-life crisis and organisations must start reassessing corporate purpose and recalibrate how they see their role in the world around them. Although profit is critical for companies to remain sustainable, we are looking at what other things beyond profit are, the innovation between meaning and matrix, and how you might measure that.
In South Africa, we saw how Coca Cola South Africa realised they needed to shift their business priorities. They partnered with Pepco, a not-for-profit recycling company, and successfully drove in country recycling of plastic bottles up from 14% in 2005 to 65%. If you put this against the backdrop of a R250 million a year recycling industry, that also provides an income for over 64,000 people. It places our country ahead of the EU and the US in plastic bottle recycling. This provides a powerful example of the new types of value.
Trend 2: Money changers
As digital currencies come into being, our mental model of what money does and how we perceive money, changes. COVID-19 has accelerated societies into becoming cashless and has shifted how we view money. These tectonic shifts create numerous opportunities for a host of new products and players. In 2019 we saw a launch of three new digital banks in South Africa alone.
In Tanzania, mobile money users were previously required to send a long string of 40-digit codes to send money to another user. A certain company saw this as an opportunity to differentiate and developed an experience-led solution to make money transfers and the payments simpler by cutting out those codes and using just a single layer for a multi-SIM user to manage all their mobile money accounts in one place. Africa has for years led the world in understanding how money can change.
Trend 3: Walking barcodes
Our physical bodies are becoming as trackable as our digital selves. However, when it comes to facial and body recognition technology, what is the trade-off between privacy and convenience? Although there is much controversy on this, it may be here to stay as we move from the Internet of Things to the Internet of Bodies.
In UK telemedicine[2] for instance the use of facial recognition has helped to scan the way a patient is responding to how a doctor is talking to them in a virtual conversation. The system then provides real-time feedback to the doctor about whether the patient seems to understand what the doctor is saying or not. This could be critically important especially in the pandemic and will most likely persist after the pandemic is over.
Locally, around 494 million sub-Saharan Africans are without official proof of identity, which is important to enable healthcare, financial and government services. Biometric solutions can help. However, they leave no room for data mistakes, and with more than half of Africa’s 54 countries having no data protection or privacy laws, and of the 14 countries that do, 9 have no regulators to enforce them, which poses a real challenge in managing and protecting data.
Trend 4: Liquid people
Consumption habits are…
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Read the full article by Marcel Rossouw, Group Director, Fjord Johannesburg, as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the August/September 2020 edition of BusinessBrief.
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