Thought of the day: Video killed the radio star

Video Killed The Radio Star plays on the radio as I write the intro to this week’s newsletter. I think it is still as catchy as when I sang along at the school disco, all those years ago! Oh-a-aho oh!

Back then I did not realise the lyrics are about behaviours towards changes in technology. The song relates to concerns about new inventions and machines for the media arts sector.

Little did they know that in 2020 a pandemic would see a gigantic up take of digital solutions across both our family and working lives?

Recent data shows that we have catapulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks. Wow!

It’s easy to see how.  Banks have transitioned to remote service teams and launched digital outreach to customers to make flexible payments. Shops loss of footfall resulted in stores having to move to online ordering and delivery as their primary business. Schools in many areas pulled off online learning and the digital classroom was shared with parents! Doctors are delivering zoom consultations and manufacturers are actively developing plans for “lights out” factories. The list goes on but we’re not shocked anymore about the changes and these new behaviours have become habits.

The Digital Advantage is a great source of inspiration for SME’s. This is an opportunity and those businesses that embrace digital solutions will have greater resiliency in the face of adversity—and a leg up on the competition that will enable them to recover faster.

As you start and grow your business think about your digital advantage/s:

• Efficiency: harness digital technologies to streamline your operations and where you can automate those manual processes.

• Productivity: look after yourself and your employees ensuring everyone is set up to work remotely and find tools to maximise workforce productivity and sustain your company culture.

• Security: embrace digitalisation and be better prepared and more resilient to the cyber threats in the current environment.

• Customer: monitor and uncover emerging customer needs.

• Agility: use data-driven insight to make decisions faster and act on them faster.

Savvy organisations will focus now on leveraging insights from their customer data and they will continue to develop a more holistic view. Detecting those signals of change early will be crucial to optimising the customer experience and redefining customer value propositions in line with evolving preferences and needs.

Digitalisation can boost the transformation towards a more sustainable circular economy. In some cases, digitalisation may even have been the spark for creating a circular solution in the first place.

Digitalisation is a driving force behind a number of industries but the BGP team are passionate about the circular economy and digitalisation. There is a clear connection between these two trends, and in order to accelerate change towards a sustainable circular economy, further coordination is needed.

Digitalisation can help drive this transition towards circular business in a variety of ways digital transformation is a major opportunity for individual companies to re-think their future, their strategy, their value chain, their value creation, their operations, and the basis of pricing, as well as their sales channels and customer engagement.

We can grow our businesses and see each of these changes are also possible from a circular economy point of view.

Currently, there is a window of opportunity for fundamental circular economy innovation.

Companies are encouraged to seize this opportunity and enhance their operations. We want to help you do that and our next bootcamp can be your first step. If you are interested in enhancing your organisation’s long-term value then please check out the details below on our Sustainable Growth Bootcamp: Big Impact, Small Footprint.

Heather Carroll
Business Development Manager