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Last week, we introduced our 2021 Business Trends report based on in-depth conversations with top CSOs in our Outthinker Strategy Network. We will be expanding on one of these trends every week with the intention of supporting your organization’s strategy for the next year and beyond. Newsletter subscribers will receive early access to each weekly announcement. If you want to be the first to receive the latest updates, fill out the form at the bottom of this page to subscribe to our newsletter.

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Picture this: you’ve been stuck at home for a large part of the past nine months. You’ve completed your Zoom meetings for the day and rinsed off after a quick ride on your Peloton bike. The ingredients for dinner are in the fridge, dropped off earlier by HelloFresh.

You feel healthy and safe, thanks to an online chat with your doctor where she sent a refill for your prescription medication. Before bed, you watch an episode of your favorite show on Netflix and wind down by listening to a guided meditation on the Headspace app.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Thanks to cloud computing, the “as a service” business model was popularized years ago with the ability to rent computing power, storage, and infrastructure on a usage basis. Over the past year, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken that model to new levels and driven behavior patterns that have multiplied the adoption of anything as a service (XaaS).

Virtual delivery models offer everything online 

Beyond a pricing model, TeleXaaS encompasses services that were traditionally delivered in-person and have quickly moved online. Today, you can learn something newchange your habits, or talk with your therapist in an exclusively virtual delivery model. Even airlines have pivoted to send their products through a customer subscription without their setting foot on a plane.

XaaS was already a major player pre-Covid, with a market value of $93.8 billion in 2018 projected to reach $344.3 billion by 2024, but unexpected, pandemic-driven behavior adaptations have added even more market potential and new virtual layers. With the rise of the cloud, the IT sector showed us how anything can be delivered as a service via the internet, and in 2020, Covid has forced us to see how easy it is to get household items, education, and entertainment delivered safely to our homes.

For organizations, TeleXaaS enables scalability, improves accessibility, and reduces implementation times. For consumers, it often reduces total cost of ownership, increases convenience, and enhances the overall experience of using a service.

How can you move to TeleXaas?

If your company has been reluctant to move to an as-a-service delivery model, it may be time to reconsider. Would your own offerings and customer base benefit from faster implementation times and an OPEX purchasing model? Additionally, does your organization offer face-to-face experiences and services that might now be delivered virtually?

Consider the following:

  • If the physical “product” you currently offer is simply a vehicle by which to deliver certain types of value or outcomes, what are the top five benefits you deliver to your customers? Example: For some car owners, their car is a physical package that gives them the benefit of transporting themselves to stores, schools, work, and other places they need to be. For others, the car is a vehicle for creating prestige or communicating something about their character.
  • Which of these top five benefits could you potentially deliver virtually? Example: could you get people to stores virtually (like Instacart), schools virtually (through online classes), or deliver prestige virtually (with social-media images and badges)?
  • What would you charge for, and how might you deliver, the services you could offer remotely?

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels 

Leverage
Point
“8Ps” of StrategyOpportunity
for Disruption
Recommended Leverage Points
Position- The farmers, individual and corporate, that you are targeting.

- The need of the agricultural industry that you seek to fill.
3- What technologies do you control that can help you tap into market
segments that you previously thought unreachable?

- What are the potential business alliances you could think about with key players in the segment to serve your customers with integrated solutions? (Serving customers with more integrated solutions example: serving farmers with fertilizers, crop protection and other).
Product- The products you offer, and the characteristics that affect their value to customers.

- The technology you develop for producing those products.
8- What moves are your organization taking to implement Big Data and analytics to your operations? What IoT and blockchain applications can you use?

- What tools and technology could you utilize or develop to improve food quality, traceability, and
production?

- How can you develop a more sustainable production model to accommodate constraints on arable
land?

- What is the future business model needed to serve new differentiated products to your customers?
Promotion- How you connect with farmers and consumers across a variety of locations and industries.
- How to make consumers, producers, and other stakeholders aware of your products and services.
8- How are you connecting your product with individual and corporate farms who could utilize it?
- How could you anticipate market and customer needs to make customers interested in accessing your differentiated products?
PriceHow consumers and other members of the agricultural supply chain pay for access to agricultural products.7- What elements of value comprise your pricing? How do each of those elements satisfy the varying needs of your customers?
Placement- How food products reach consumers. How the technologies, data, and services reach stakeholders in the supply chain.9- What new paths might exist for helping consumers access the food they desire?
- How are you adapting your operations and supply chain to accommodate consumers’ desire for proximity to the food they eat?
- How could you anticipate customer expectation to make products more
accessible to customers/agile supply chain?
- Have you considered urbanization as a part of your growth strategy?
Physical
Experience
- How your food satisfies the needs and desires of your customer.
- How the services you provide to agribusiness fulfill their needs.
9- Where does your food rate on a taste, appearance, and freshness
scale?
- Could the services you provide to companies and farms in the agriculture industry be expanded to meet more needs?
- What senses does your food affect besides hunger? How does your
customer extract value from your food in addition to consumption?
Processes- Guiding your food production operations in a manner cognizant of social pressure.8- How can you manage the supply chain differently to improve traceability and reduce waste?
- How can you innovate systems in production, processing, storing, shipping, retailing, etc.?
- What are new capabilities to increase sustainability (impact on the environment, or ESG) components?
People- The choices you make regarding hiring, organizing, and incentivizing your people and your culture.- How are you leveraging the agricultural experience of your staff bottom-up to achieve your vision?
- How do you anticipate new organizational capabilities needed to perform your future strategy (innovation, exponential technologies needed, agile customer relationship, innovative supply chain)?
- How do you manage your talents to assure suitable development with exposure in the agrifood main challenges/allowing a more sustainable view of the opportunities/cross-sectors?
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