You will no doubt have noticed it: digital technology and globalization are taking us out of a categorical world, which fell into predefined, clear and distinct matrices, to an increasingly hybrid world, where everything tends to become double, mixed, a little vague, often contradictory and motley. In short, nothing more fits in the boxes!
Identities, cultures and behaviors are no exception to the rule and this can be destabilizing for companies, which no longer necessarily know which way to go. Hybridisation brings out unpredictable, unbreakable and elusive consumers. Faced with this change, what strategy should companies adopt? The answer is simple: the world is hybrid, so hybridise yourself!
The service society took over from the industrial society, as we have known for some time, but today we are entering a society where the line between product and service is blurring in favor of the uses that intertwine everything; we are now in the hybrid society of uses. We see this clearly in the new modes of consumption, - multichannel, heterogeneous and often contradictory -, which force the distribution sector to invent new types of services, new types of marketing and stores where one does not sell. only products, but also experiences and emotions.
Likewise, technologies bring about the emergence of intangible and virtual economies, alongside the real economy; which invites companies to intermingle to offer new offers, maintain their competitive advantages and conquer new markets. Now is the time for entanglements, which muddy the waters: the competitors of yesterday will be the allies of tomorrow and the allies of today are likely to become the rivals of the day after tomorrow ...
Competitive advantage. For a company, what will make its competitive advantage is not the amount of data it has collected, but its ability to build new bridges between this data. In short, its hybridisation capacity. The treasure is not big data, but link data! It is the company's ability to combine, to hybridise, faster and more original than others that will allow it to truly innovate. This will give rise to third-party services, third-party objects, third-party organizations, third-party uses. What made Apple so strong is precisely this logic of the unprecedented combination of materials, disciplines, uses and functions.
The need for companies to adopt sustainable development, respectful of resources, will result in a gradual hybridisation of their operation with that of nature: the circular economy, for example, is an interesting avenue, since it is the mirror from the basic movement of the environment where nothing is lost and everything is transformed!
This strategy can also make sense even within companies, which have everything to gain from hybridising their organizational and working methods with those of start-ups, to adopt a more agile, more creative, more entrepreneurial approach. horizontal. Now is the time for organizational charts and hybrid job descriptions!
Vector of unpredictability. Of course, this can scare a number of business leaders, precisely for the reasons explained above: the hybrid is a vector of unpredictability, vagueness, crossbreeding, contradictions. This fear is not new: in Western thought, it has been around for centuries, so much so that we have embodied it within a myth in a monstrous, aggressive and menacing figure: the Centaur.
But it is high time to reconcile ourselves with the centaurs and learn to tame this new state of the world. Beyond being a question of survival, companies will have everything to gain by pursuing such a strategy, since by hybridising they will also be more agile, more creative, greener and richer.
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