NOVEMBER 2017 / NO. 1
TAGS: PETER HINSSEN, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, HUB FIRMS

The phenomenon of hub firms

“The winner takes ALL – Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. These are called them ‘hub firms’ and they are expected to shape our collective future”
“The chance of a new Google is small, however the chance that Google takes over your customers is huge”, Peter Hinssen in “The Day after Tomorrow”, September 2017
Traditional companies spend much of their time monitoring start-ups. Likewise, the financial world does this by monitoring the fintech sector. Should we fear those start-ups or should we fear others? In his new book, “The Day after Tomorrow”, Peter Hinssen tells us that we should fear potential new competitors who will take over interactions with customers. The following eight companies: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, are the new ‘hub firms’ that will shape our collective future. This is because:
  1. They dominate individual markets
  2. They create and control essential connections in the networks that pervade our economies
  3. They form and control crucial competitive bottlenecks
  4. They are able to extract disproportionate value
  5. They tip the global competitive balance
In an average company, 99% of the employees are busy with ‘today’ or with ‘yesterday’s sh*t’ and they probably think that change will not happen that fast. But what will happen in the next 10-12 years with an aging population, retirement, increases in healthcare costs and disruption of labor markets? One can imagine a few unexpected events that might occur that could lead to an unemployment rate of 20% across Europe? Our social-economic system would implode. In China and Singapore, they know exactly what is going on with the digital revolution in mobility, in education and in healthcare. The new ‘hub firms’ know exactly where we are going.
For many companies this is the ultimate challenge. How can they deal with this? Strategic intelligence is the perfect way to give you the answers by monitoring those eight ‘hub firms’. By doing this you can gain new insights, foresight, and early warning, all of which lead to new courses of action and improved decision-making. However, management might neglect this and treat this it as a Gray Rhino, as described in the previous section.
“I don’t want to listen to politicians in Europe anymore. They don’t have the slightest idea what is going to happen, however in China and Singapore they do”, Peter Hinssen in “The Day after Tomorrow”, September 2017
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