Competing in a world of sectors without borders

Digitization is causing a radical reordering of traditional industry boundaries. What will it take to play offense and defense in tomorrow’s ecosystems?

Rakuten Ichiba is Japan’s single largest online retail marketplace. It also provides loyalty points and e-money usable at hundreds of thousands of stores, virtual and real. It issues credit cards to tens of millions of members. It offers financial products and services that range from mortgages to securities brokerage. And the company runs one of Japan’s largest online travel portals—plus an instant-messaging app, Viber, which has some 800 million users worldwide. Retailer? Financial company? Rakuten Ichiba is all that and more—just as Amazon and China’s Tencent are tough to categorize as the former engages in e-commerce, cloud-computing, logistics, and consumer electronics, while the latter provides services ranging from social media to gaming to finance and beyond.

Organizations such as these—digital natives that are not defined or constrained by any one industry—may seem like outliers. How applicable to traditional industries is the notion of simultaneously competing in multiple sectors, let alone reimagining sector boundaries? We would be the first to acknowledge that opportunities to attack and to win across sectors vary considerably and that industry definitions have always been fluid: technological developments cause sectors to appear, disappear, and merge. Banking, for example, was born from the merger of money exchange, merchant banking, savings banking, and safety-deposit services, among others. Supermarkets unified previously separate retail subsectors into one big “grocery” category. Changes such as these created new competitors, shifted vast amounts of wealth, and reshaped significant parts of the economy. Before the term was in vogue, one could even say the shifts were “disruptive.”

Yet there does appear to be something new happening here. The ongoing digital revolution, which has been reducing frictional, transactional costs for years, has accelerated recently with tremendous increases in electronic data, the ubiquity of mobile interfaces, and the growing power of artificial intelligence. Together, these forces are reshaping customer expectations and creating the potential for virtually every sector with a distribution component to have its borders redrawn or redefined, at a more rapid pace than we have previously experienced.

Consider first how customer expectations are shifting. As Steve Jobs famously observed, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” By creating a customer-centric, unified value proposition that extends beyond what end users could previously obtain (or, at least, could obtain almost instantly from one interface), digital pioneers are bridging the openings along the value chain, reducing customers’ costs, providing them with new experiences, and whetting their appetites for more.

We’ve all experienced businesses that once seemed disconnected fitting together seamlessly and unleashing surprising synergies: look no farther than the phone in your pocket, your music and video in the cloud, the smart watch on your wrist, and the TV in your living room. Or consider the 89 million customers now accessing Ping An Good Doctor, where on a single platform run by the trusted Ping An insurance company they can connect with doctors not only for online bookings but to receive diagnoses and suggested treatments, often by exchanging pictures and videos. What used to take many weeks and multiple providers can now be done in minutes on one app.

Now nondigital natives are starting to think seriously about their cross-sector opportunities and existential threats that may lurk across boundaries. One example: We recently interviewed 300 CEOs worldwide, across 37 sectors, about advanced data analytics. Fully one-third of them had cross-sector dynamics at top of mind. Many worried, for instance, that “companies from other industries have clearer insight into my customers than I do.” We’ve also seen conglomerates that until recently had thought of themselves as little more than holding companies taking the first steps to set up enterprise-wide consumer data lakes, integrate databases, and optimize the products, services, and insights they provide to their customers. Although these companies must of course abide by privacy laws—and even more, meet their users’ expectations of trust—data sets and sources are becoming great unifiers and creating new, cross-sectoral competitive dynamics.

Do these dynamics portend a sea change for every company? Of course not. People will still stroll impromptu into neighborhood stores, heavy industry (with the benefit of technological advances, to be sure) will go on extracting and processing the materials essential to our daily lives, and countless other enterprises beyond the digital space will continue to channel the ingenuity of their founders and employees to serve a world of incredibly varied preferences and needs. It’s obvious that digital will not—and cannot—change everything.

But it’s just as apparent that its effects on the competitive landscape are already profound and that the stakes are getting higher. As boundaries between industry sectors continue to blur, CEOs—many of whose companies have long commanded large revenue pools within traditional industry lines—will face off against companies and industries they never previously viewed as competitors. This new environment will play out by new rules, require different capabilities, and rely to an extraordinary extent upon data.

Defending your position will be mission critical, but so too will be attacking and capturing the opportunities across sectors before others get there first. To put it another way: within a decade, companies will define their business models not by how they play against traditional industry peers but by how effective they are in competing within rapidly emerging “ecosystems,” comprising a variety of businesses from dimensionally different sectors.

A world of digital ecosystems

As the approaching contest plays out, we believe an increasing number of industries will converge under newer, broader, and more dynamic alignments: digital ecosystems. A world of ecosystems will be a highly customer-centric model, where users can enjoy an end-to-end experience for a wide range of products and services through a single access gateway, without leaving the ecosystem. Ecosystems will comprise diverse players who provide digitally accessed, multi-industry solutions. The relationship among these participants will be commercial and contractual, and the contracts (whether written, digital, or both) will formally regulate the payments or other considerations trading hands, the services provided, and the rules governing the provision of and access to ecosystem data.

Beyond just defining relationships among ecosystem participants, the digitization of many such arrangements is changing the boundaries of the company by reducing frictional costs associated with activities such as trading, measurement, and maintaining trust. More than 80 years ago, Nobel laureate Ronald Coase argued that companies establish their boundaries on the basis of transaction costs like these: when the cost of transacting for a product or service on the open market exceeds the cost of managing and coordinating the incremental activity needed to create that product or service internally, the company will perform the activity in-house. As digitization reduces transaction costs, it becomes economic for companies to contract out more activities, and a richer set of more specialized ecosystem relationships is facilitated.

Rising expectations

Those ecosystem relationships, in turn, are making it possible to better meet rising customer expectations. The mobile Internet, the data-crunching power of advanced analytics, and the maturation of artificial intelligence (AI) have led consumers to expect fully personalized solutions, delivered in milliseconds. Ecosystem orchestrators use data to connect the dots—by, for example, linking all possible producers with all possible customers, and, increasingly, by predicting the needs of customers before they are articulated. The more a company knows about its customers, the better able it is to offer a truly integrated, end-to-end digital experience and the more services in its ecosystem it can connect to those customers, learning ever more in the process. Amazon, among digital natives, and Centrica, the British utility whose Hive offering seeks to become a digital hub for controlling the home from any device, are early examples of how pivotal players can become embedded in the everyday life of customers.

For all of the speed with which sector boundaries will shift and even disappear, courting deep customer relationships is not a one-step dance. Becoming part of an individual’s day-to-day experience takes time and, because digitization lowers switching costs and heightens price transparency, sustaining trust takes even longer. Over that time frame, significant surplus may shift to consumers—a phenomenon already underway, as digital players are destroying billions to create millions. It’s also a process that will require deploying newer tools and technologies, such as using bots in multidevice environments and exploiting AI to build machine-to-machine capabilities. Paradoxically, sustaining customer relationships will depend as well on factors that defy analytical formulae: the power of a brand, the tone of one’s message, and the emotions your products and services can inspire.