Challenges for business film and transcript

Robin Bew

Editorial Director and Chief Economist, Economist Intelligence Unit

On emerging markets

When I look back before the financial crisis, most major businesses in Britain had exposure to the emerging world, but it was often incremental to what they were doing here in Europe or in America – if they had a division out there it was growing very quickly. I think going forwards what you're going to see is that emerging markets will increasingly become completely core to what businesses in the UK are trying to do and businesses in the rest of the developed world as well. Because a lot of the growth, a lot of the spending power, is being amassed in places like China and India and Latin America, and actually further afield than that too – and businesses are going to have to be able to take advantage of that.

Sir George Cox

Author of the Cox Review on Creativity in Business

On the aging population

Now, if you go back a few years, we educated people into their teens, mid-teens they were out to work and then they retired at 65, 70 and pretty soon they dropped off their perch so they didn't act as a burden to the rest of society or their families. That's all changed and as a consequence, less and less of our lives at present are being spent economically active. And at present they just won't pay for the whole of the life cycle. So we have an issue with regard to pensions, we have an issue with regard to should we allow people like myself to retire early; you know earlier than they really should in terms of activity? That has to change. It also creates new markets because people now, later in life are interested in activities, fashion.

Robin Bew

On innovation in the developing world

I think the thing that Western businesses often miss though, is there’s an enormous amount of innovation coming out of places like China and India, and it’s very easy, I think, for Western businesses to dismiss that – to assume it’s not going to be competitive; it won’t be a threat to them – but actually I think that’s completely wrong. But you see emerging world companies not only succeeding in their home markets, but increasingly able to push products and services into Western markets as well, and so British business and other businesses in Europe need to be alert to the fact that developing world companies are extraordinarily innovative and are often coming up with solutions that leave some of our products standing.

On the rising cost of carbon

It’s very likely that we will see a carbon tax of some sort or other coming into place, or at least some carbon trading permits. You're going to see the prices of energy start to rise. And that will force business to adopt different strategies from the one they have at the moment, because it’s going to change their cost base quite significantly. And while of course we’re seeing a lot of good action on the part of firms over the course of the last decade or so in this area, the really big changes to companies’ strategy only really happened when oil prices hit $150 a barrel and businesses really started to adjust to that. Now we're not at those highs right now, but if you look forward for a decade or so, I think you're going to see the whole cost-base story is going to change quite significantly, and companies will have to change in order to survive – and that’s a much stronger imperative than just being pushed by NGOs and consumers. You will see total changes in the business model around sustainability, and companies that aren’t able to grasp that will fail.

Nick Jankel

Chief Executive Officer, wecreate

On ambiguity and disruptive innovation

As someone who works in innovation and used to be an innovation consultant, I've always found UK business exceptionally resistant to the ambiguity necessary when you are creating something truly new. So a disruptive business and a disruptive innovator has to deal with possibly two or three or four years when they won’t know if it’s going to work. They have indications, they have senses, they have feelings, but they don’t know it’s going to work, but if you stick with it, you eventually get an iPod. What UK businesses tend to do is they try stuff out very slowly and small scale, and they don’t tend to be very good at tolerating the unknowns that a good design process is going to have in it by nature of not knowing what you are going to create because that’s what you want to create, something new. I think businesses in the UK just need to start to really understand that you can’t manage or control a good creative process.

Roberto Verganti

Professor of Management of Innovation, Politecnico di Milano

On developing the right vision

For business people the next challenge is that with all this investment in design and with open innovation processes, having ideas today is very easy. I mean, ideas are very cheap. You can find them easily around. The big challenge for businessmen would be to have the right vision to select the ideas, to connect the dots and put them together into a real strategy. 

Robin Bew

On doing more with a lot less

The other thing which is interesting and very different from before is that many of the companies we work with are used to having very easy access to funds in order to invest or pursue their strategic imperatives – credit was easy to get, it was easy to issue shares – but when you look going forward, it’s going to be much more difficult, so companies are going to have to be able to do a lot more with a lot less, and that is probably going to require more than just tweaking your business model; it may require complete re-engineering of the way you run your business.

Bonnie Dean

Design Council member and Senior Adviser, Quantum Property Partnership

Opportunities in the current crisis

I think the current economic crisis that we are in is a fantastic opportunity because I think we, as a nation, we spend a lot of money on things that were worthy and I think the country did want to see improve, but I'm not sure we spent the money in the wisest possible way. One of the things I think design can help with is, let’s rethink how in fact we spend our money, and we still want to improve our public services and we still want to use them in different ways, but how do we do that with the funds that we have available today.

Paul Bennett

Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer, IDEO

The time to redesign your business

So one of the things and one of the conversations I'm having a lot at the moment with clients is where do you start, how do you experiment, how do you get things to happen, where do you begin, and how can we help you. How can we help you break the problem that you have into a meaningful chunk and start? Again, I'm big into metaphors, but if you reach a fork in the road, take it. So, I think again, you know, we’re saying to our clients at the moment this is the time to disrupt yourself, to grow your business and to start to think about the meaning of what it is that you are doing.