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Six Degrees Of Competition: The Future Might Surprise You

Source: www.youngupstarts.com - Thursday, June 27, 2019
by Kris Oestergaard, author of “ Transforming Legacy Organizations: Turn your Established Business into an Innovation Champion to Win the Future “ Do you really know who your competitors are? I mean, not just the obvious ones who have direct substitutional products, but also the ones who indirectly affect usage of your offerings today and who might have a massive impact on your value offerings in the near future? A way to investigate this is through a simple game I call “6 degrees of competition.” The answers you find may surprise you and not only illuminate the threats out there, but also unveil massive opportunity. Throughout the 20th Century, scientists around the world explored social networks and the influence of technological development on human connections. Most famously, in 1967, psychologist Stanley Milgram sent letters to 160 different people in the United States and asked them to forward the letters to the acquaintances they thought would bring the letters closest to one ultimate recipient, a stockbroker in Boston. At the end of the experiment, Milgram found that each letter made five stops on average. Hence, the phrase “six degrees of separation,” with which you may be familiar. The point here is that the world is getting smaller, and that the connections between us are becoming shorter. This is known as the “small world problem.” If you take this principle and use it to analyze your competitive landscape, something

Source: Breaking News

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