#88—Mohan Subramaniam: The Future of Competitive Strategy and the Evolving Role of Data, Customers and Digital Ecosystems

Mohan Subramaniam is a Professor of Strategy and Digital Transformation at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. He focuses on the digital transformation of incumbent industrial firms and new sources of competitive advantage in the digital age. He is a recognized thought leader in digital strategy, and have helped senior executives in several companies find new sources of value and growth for their companies when competing with data within emerging digital ecosystems.

He outlines his thinking in his 2022 book The Future of Competitive Strategy: Unleashing the Power of Data and Digital Ecosystems, where he introduces a new paradigm for competitive strategy anchored in data and digital ecosystems and the game-changing role of digital technologies in the modern economy. Legacy firms have for decades anchored their competitive strategy in products and industry characteristics, but these approaches are now becoming outdated. His book therefore explains how legacy firms can harness their existing assets, infrastructure, and traditional strengths to leverage the new and explosive power of data by thoughtfully applying and emulating the best practices of digital titans such as Amazon and Google.

His articles regularly appear in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review. I have also published articles in several leading academic journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Management, and the Journal of International Business Studies, and my research has been recognized by awards from Strategic Management Society, McKinsey Corporation, the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business, and the Decision Sciences Institute.

In this episode, Mohan shares:

Why some of the long-prevailing concepts of competitive strategy, like Michael Porter’s industry value chain, industry attractiveness (or five forces), and even the central paradigm of these approaches may have served us well for decades, but are increasingly becoming ineffectiveHow traditional legacy firms can harness their existing assets, infrastructure, and traditional strengths to be even more effective at the digital game than digital native giants like Amazon and Google Why the first step for such incumbent organizations should be to evolve your traditional customers to digital customers Why we should not just be thinking about ecosystems broadly, but about two specific—and different—ecosystems we need to create, and what they areWhy the idea that so many companies have of capturing and owning lots of data misses the point of what it means to win with data, in a world where the shelf-life value of the data you collect is getting shorter and shorter

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"The big shift in thinking is that we always thought of data as something that supports our product. What I'm saying is that think of products as something that can support your data."

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Episode Timeline:

00:00—Highlight from today's episode

01:02—Introducing Mohan + The topic of today’s episode

2:58—If you really know me, you know that...

3:25—What is your definition of strategy?

3:36—Could you talk to us about your thesis involving your ideas around Michael Porter's idea of competitive advantage?

7:51—Why is competitive advantage less relevant today than it was 40 years ago when it was created?

10:50—Can you explain how data has impacted our idea of customers, and how companies should make the transition from traditional customers to digital customers?

13:06—Can you give an example of a physical product that is able to create continuous data and not episodic?

15:11—Could you explain the differences between two different types of the two types of ecosystems you detail in your book?

18:23—Could you explain how value chains have expanded to include complements outside of the traditional service and product offering?

21:03—If we were to put production and consumption capabilities into a diagram (like an x and y-axis), how would you explain how the two interact and interplay?

24:20—Could you illustrate your point of how products can deliver value outside of what its obvious value with the light bulb story?

27:13—How should companies be thinking about the role of data given everything we've talked about today? It has a very short shelf life, so it is about controlling data necessarily?

29:25—Closing

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Additional Resources:

Personal Page: http://www.professormohan.com/

IMD Faculty Page: https://www.imd.org/faculty/professors/mohan-subramaniam/

Newest Book: https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/david-shrier/basic-metaverse/9781472148131/

Linkedin: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/mohan-subramaniam-961986b

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Profmohans