Collaboration is the key in emerging business space

SINGAPORE: Success in the emerging business ecosystem will not depend solely on use of latest technology but on the ability of companies and players to collaborate to reach their target market, according to panelists at the Mint Asia-Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in Singapore on Friday.

The panellists said at the session, titled Opportunities in the Emerging Business Ecosystems, that companies cannot own anything nor claim to provide everything to the market because there will always be bigger, well-funded players out to disrupt the space and offer specific products or services.

Arthur Lang, the CEO (international) at SingTel, remarked that the business ecosystem is emerging in such a way that everyone becomes part of a much bigger scheme of things.

SingTel, he cited, cannot provide pizza delivery but partner with another firm that can deliver using its platform.

“No one really controls it but everyone is coming together with one common objective and that is to provide what the customer wants. It’s really about finding out what the customers want and what the customer wants sometimes can be many different things,” Lang said.

Brad Loiselle, founder-president and CEO of education technology startup BetterU, agrees that the emerging business ecosystems require companies to work together. “We have to collaborate. You can’t own anything, ” he said.

According to Loiselle, whose firm focuses on providing education around the world, his company built an ecosystem that brings together leaders in the field from across the globe onto a platform where they are not competitors but represent their brands.

Robert Yap, the executive chairman of logistics firm YCH Group, suggested that collaboration and innovation are keys to success in the current business space.

“A lot of people look at tech as innovation. Tech is not innovation, it is the way of leveraging technology, looking at how actually we use technology as an enabler to the business,” he said.