Industry and Policy: Partnerships in Disruptive Times

Abstract

world is going through a number of unprecedented changes, including in geopolitics, technology, and the climate. This dynamic environment calls for new forms of collaboration between government and industry, as the traditional arm's-length client-provider relationship is not responsive enough for today's rapid pace of change. existing collaboration models are running out of steam. Where in the past government collaboration was limited to small coalitions of like-minded partners, for today and tomorrow there must be a change in collaboration models beyond the typical approach. These new collaboration models require different policies to be workable in the government space. This article will explore key elements of these policies. Most are not new and have been called for many times, but the urgency to implement them keeps increasing due to the changes in the world. Two key elements will underpin successful policies for dealing with and the impact of technology: an ecosystem and an platform.Making the Case for ChangeMany reports describe an emerging picture of a mind-boggling number of devices and sensors connected to the Internet. For example, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 35 billion objects will be online. Already in 2016, the spending on new Internet of Things (loT) hardware will exceed $2.5 million per minute.1 digital and physical world will continue to integrate and become increasingly interconnected. Physical things will have a digital layer around them, and each of these things will have a digital footprint and thus generate an incredible volume of data. Not only will the volume of data increase, but the nature of the data will change as well. This is disrupting existing approaches to computing while opening vast new opportunities to create value.That is especially true of edge data, which includes all the new forms of data generated by users and their devices, such as tablets, smartphones, sensors and more. It is fast-paced, dynamic, unstructured, temporal in nature, unlike any prior data creation model. Edge data is incredibly rich in offering an understanding of context and, therefore, has potentially very high value. This is but one example of a technology trend that already has a big impact on organizations, and there is rather a confluence of developments. Each of the trends in nano, bio and information technology will have its own line of development. Information technology alone will have a effect, and certainly when it is combined with new possibilities in nano and bio technology.Partnership Models in the Age of Disruptive InnovationManagement guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive in his book, The Innovators Dilemma, in 1997.2 This was later followed by the term disruptive innovation to describe how new entrants target the bottom of a market and then relentlessly move up market, eventually ousting established providers. However, what was once a relatively rare phenomenon has now become a regular occurrence. Innovations that harness new technologies or business models, or exploit old technologies in new ways, are emerging on an almost daily basis. Disruptive is not a popular word in government circles, but the accelerating digitization and impact of radical technology changes are certainly also disrupting government.In 2012, IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBV) conducted its fifth biennial Global CEO Study.3 This was based on more than 1700 interviews with CEOs from 64 countries across 18 industries, including government. As part of the analysis, the IBV sought to understand differences between responses of CEOs in outperforming organizations and those in underperforming organizations. According to the study, of all the external forces that could impact their organizations over the next three to five years, CEOs see change in technology as the most critical, as technological factors are by far the biggest of the various external forces buffeting their organizations. …