Embrace Disruption: The Key to Long-Term Success for Mid-Market Telecom Enterprises

The Telecom industry is undergoing rapid changes; therefore, telecommunications and disruption management experts must embrace innovative and disruptive strategies to remain competitive.

The Telecom industry is projected to reach $1.4 trillion in revenue in 2023, as per Statista, highlighting the scale of the opportunity for businesses willing to take risks and be bold.

The shift to 5G, the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the increased use of cloud computing are three trends currently shaping the telecommunications industry. These trends provide exciting new opportunities for innovation and growth, and businesses that embrace them will be well-positioned to thrive.

According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global 5G services market size is expected to grow from $53.93 billion in 2020 to $249.27 billion by 2026 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.9% during the forecast period. This growth is driven by increasing demand for high-speed internet connectivity, rising adoption of IoT devices, and the growing need for low-latency connectivity.

The IoT market is also expected to experience significant growth in the coming years. According to a report by Business Insider Intelligence, the global installed base of IoT devices is expected to grow from 7 billion in 2018 to 21.5 billion in 2025, at a CAGR of 14%. The report also suggests that businesses adopting IoT technologies could see a $1.6 trillion boost to their bottom line by 2025.

Mid-market enterprises must also conduct a competitive analysis to help them understand the industry’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By identifying these key areas, businesses can develop targeted strategies that address their unique challenges. However, sometimes it is not enough.

Exponential Organizations applied to Telecom to stay ahead of disruption.

The Exponential Organization (ExO) framework is one tool businesses can use to stay ahead of the curve in Telecom. It enables companies to create new markets and value networks by focusing on critical areas such as staff on demand, community and crowd, and algorithms. Adopting this framework can help businesses stay agile and respond quickly to embrace technological disruption.

Innovation in emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, metaverse, and blockchain are essential to creating value propositions and enhancing customer experiences. Therefore, mid-market enterprises in the industry must remain customer-centric and stay on top of the latest trends to stay ahead of the competition.

Managing technological disruption is critical to achieving long-term success in the telecommunications industry. Mid-market enterprises must be proactive and willing to pivot quickly to stay ahead of the curve. They must also remain close to their customers, listen to their needs, and adapt to changing market conditions.

To validate this message, a study by Accenture found that companies that invest in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and the cloud can expect to see revenue growth rates that are up to 10 times higher than those of companies that don’t invest in these technologies.

Innovative Strategies for Transformation in Mid-Market Telecom Companies

Transformation is crucial for mid-market telecom companies to remain competitive and adapt to the ever-evolving market. Based on our experience, mid-market telecom firms must consider several principles to achieve successful digital transformation.

  1. Enhance customer, employee, and ecosystem stakeholder experiences!
  2. Identify the necessary insights, data, analysis, and operational models.
  3. Develop a platform strategy focusing on agility, speed, and data management.
  4. Create a comprehensive approach that fosters collaboration and innovative thinking!
  5. Improve internal and external company systems and processes’ resilience, security, and ethical technology.

Telecom businesses must have a precise strategic business aim for their transformation, analyzing their potential to adapt and succeed. Then, they can build a digital strategy and business model that aligns with their goals and evaluates each digital principle’s impact on their business.

Rather than beginning with technological solutions, mid-market telecom should consider the technology requirements aligned with the digital business strategy and how the business goals and required technology will impact operations and the workforce.

Conclusion

Mid-market enterprises in the telecommunications industry must embrace disruption, implement at least four exponential organization attributes, consider the five digital principles to remain competitive, and adapt to the constantly changing market. Being proactive and adaptable in the face of technological disruption is critical to long-term success. Therefore, the call to action is for businesses to embrace and implement disruptive strategies today to stay ahead of the curve. By doing so, they can create new markets, enhance customer experiences, and achieve long-term success.

*I used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Grammarly tools to generate some of the content for this post.

YPOG HBS President’s Program Celebrates In-Person Return with Unique NFT Experience

Participants of the 2023 program at Harvard Business School receive a digital proof of attendance and a commemorative collectible as non-fungible tokens, enhancing their learning about NFTs and web3 technology.

The YPOG HBS President’s Program champions at Harvard Business School have taken a unique approach to commemorate its 2023 in-person program. Members who completed the one-week program received digital proof of attendance and commemorative digital collectible NFTs or non-fungible tokens. These NFTs are unique digital tokens that cannot be replicated or exchanged for something else, making them perfect for commemorating special events and achievements.

The YPOG HBS community members continuously learn to grow as leaders and individuals. They celebrated their return to in-person with a unique 3D NFT limited edition that celebrates the X anniversary of the program. This experience also enhanced participants’ learning about NFTs and exploring how web3 is revolutionizing industries. The NFT experience aimed to help members remember their time at the 2023 YPOG HBS program and allow them to dive into the exciting world of NFTs.

The NFTs created for this experience are digital collectibles that help participants remember their time in the program and allow them to explore the world of NFTs. The experience was designed to complement what participants learned about NFTs in the program, including the “Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World” case study and the lesson “A Look into the Future – Value Creation? Or Not?”

The NFT experience was created using the NFTPlugnPlay platform and powered by Fulcrum Digital and Escalate Group. The solution integrates a seamless web2 email-based experience and a web3 experience for advanced users. NFTPlugnPlay “minted” and “distributed” the NFTs utilizing Solana blockchain and integrated Crossmint solutions and AWS cloud services. The minted NFTs are visible on the Solana Explorer or in the YPOG-HBS xNFT Opensea Collection and contain 108 unique owners.

NFTs are not just for commemorative purposes; they can also be used to tokenize documents such as licenses, birth certificates, academic certificates, and medical records while allowing authorized users to access and verify the data when required. The immutable nature of NFTs helps prevent identity theft and offers better control over data.

In conclusion, the YPOG HBS President’s Program champions at Harvard Business School have taken a unique approach to commemorate its in-person program by providing participants with a digital proof of attendance and commemorative digital collectible NFTs. This experience was designed to complement what participants learned about NFTs in the program and allow them to explore the world of NFTs. NFTs can also be used to tokenize documents and offer better control over data.

How to gain web3 competitive edge 

During the fall of 2014, attending the executive program of Singularity University at the heart of the Silicon Valley, the idea that Blockchain would be as significant to the growth of the internet in the next fifteen years as the internet has been in the previous 25 years started to grow in my mind. 

Two market cycles after, I have seen many of the world’s best minds and billions of dollars in investment pouring into the space to figure out how to use the technology to make a fully digital society a reality. The adoption of Bitcoin has increased its positioning as a store of value; smart contracts have enabled crowdfunding, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized finance (DeFi). 

Companies in various industries use blockchain to streamline processes and foster greater transparency and trust. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global blockchain market is projected to grow from $7.18 billion in 2022 to $163.83 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 56.3% in the forecast period.  

Blockchain is more than Bitcoin, Stable Coins, NFTs, DeFi, and Crypto.

Considering the pandemic, we have seen that the two main factors driving the expansion of the blockchain market are the financial services sector’s competitiveness and the health sector’s digitalization. Also, growth is fueled by the increased demand for data security, and there is already noticeable progress in the supply chain, gaming, music, and the arts. 

Our Web3 innovation practice has been helping firms in the fintech, financial services, energy, healthcare, entertainment, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors to assess the impact of blockchain and other exponential technology and trends on their business, develop integrated programs to enhance their current business models, create new ones, and gain and track their competitive advantages. 

We know from experience that blockchain is still in its infancy and that it has yet to demonstrate its potential to transform the current internet into the internet of the future. But every business needs to dip a toe into the web3 wave. While in most businesses, it might still be early to commit entirely, there are certain areas where the race has already started. 

Why Blockchain? 

We are moving from the sharing economy into the ownership economy with new ways people organize around a project; communities and decentralized organizations will play a critical role. Blockchain technology becomes essential for business and society if you believe that material contributions should have clear ownership and provenance. 

Blockchain is a platform for disintermediation; it is about trust, decentralization, and ownership. Consumers can own their data, and the technology enables tools to reward contributors and user behavior, boosting creativity, collaboration, and digital communities.  

Communities are starting to engage their members, simplifying the technology and the user experience, and from there, they are beginning to explore opportunities. Therefore, adoption driven by digital communities will be critical and effective.  

When technology is simple to use and solves a real problem, it is quickly embraced by the public. As it is, blockchain will not be an exception. Businesses must explore, build, measure, learn, and repeat to develop the skills required to flourish in the web3. 

How to gain web3 competitive edge? 

Below are the components of a disruptive innovation system to help organizations embrace blockchain disruption, gain competitive advantages, and make web3 happen. 

  1. Begin with a Massive Transformative Purpose that can be taken by your organization and your community or one that can draw a new community.  
  1. Proactively and pragmatically assess market trends impacting your business to identify opportunities where trust, ownership, and disintermediation have the potential to change the future of your industry. 
  1. Leverage your Purpose, develop relationships, and nurture community; this way, the right people will find you. 
  1. Engage your community, and educate yourself on web3 to better identify the problems your organization can solve and the jobs to be done with the customer at the core. 
  1. Set aggressive objectives and 3-5 measurable key results (OKRs), run experiments, fall fast, and learn quickly. 
  1. Establish and maintain a business rhythm and help your team to identify what they need to create new business models and monetization mechanisms. 
  1. Use data, dashboards, and real-time information to make informed decisions about where and how to invest across the web3 innovation portfolio. 
  1. Understand and measure your key success factors (KSFs), and hold yourself and your team accountable. Identify the #1 most prominent specific and measurement activity to success. 
  1. Wash, rinse, and repeat; and make sure you extend your web3 disruption innovation culture. 

Those who don’t start climbing the web3 learning curve may miss the most significant value-creation opportunity of our lifetimes, just as many people did during the transition to the world wide web in the 90s and the second wave during the 00s, where the user-generated content business models emerged. 

If you have any comments or suggestions or would like to continue the conversation, do get in touch with us. 
 

We Live in an Age of Distributed Innovation

Tokens are allowing innovators to capture economic value in open ecosystems. Therefore, Web 3 is creating the incentive structures required to solve the world’s biggest problems.

A few weeks ago, a colleague reached out to one of my networks to share her Analysis of How Blockchain Technology Could Facilitate Citizen Disruption of Innovation[1]. I took the opportunity to chat with her about how to leverage distributed innovation.

More recently, after listening to “5 Mental Models for Web 3.0 [2]” I had an Aha moment. My daughter who loves writing told me that she learned that “if you want something to exist, write it down.” I decided to write my insights about distributed innovation.

Everyone is sharing more knowledge at faster speeds and has more broadband at a lower cost. “The world is getting faster, and the power you have to change the world is getting greater.” [3]

Our lives are changing and will change even more: not in twenty or thirty years but now. Our future is arriving faster because technology continues advancing at an exponential pace. Due to abundance, not only nations or corporations, have access to plenty of talent, capital, data, and communication. As a result, we are increasing our capabilities while collaborating with people and machines.

The Internet is evolving into a third phase, the Web 3. During the coming years, even successful digital companies and platforms created as part of the sharing economy will be disrupted by the new decentralized peer2peer based business models.

To understand why digital companies will undergo disruption it is important to know that during Web 1, we made information available everywhere and instantaneous; personal and content websites and user consuming information disrupted news media, and music, among other industries. In Web 2, we enabled creators and individuals to participate and share their creations and content via podcasting, blogging, social networking, and social media on mobile-first platforms.

Now, in Web 3, developers are creating a digital property, decentralized finance, and unique non-fungible digital assets. As a result, we are disintermediating industries, protecting our data, and evolving networks and platforms into economies where all participants receive part of the value they contribute to creating.

Digital trust is enabling abundance and bringing back scarcity to the digital world. More precisely, Bitcoin is the first scarce digital object the world has ever seen. Furthermore, NFTs and blockchain technology managed to bring scarcity to the digital world by giving value to the original file rather than by trying to prevent (and prohibit) copying that file [4].

Web 3.0 is the Internet of value already disrupting the banking industry, the internet of energy, and the logistics internet altogether.  The conjunction of technologies such as blockchain, AI (Artificial Intelligence), sensors/IoT, and 3D printing, combined with other economic and cultural phenomena such as the sharing economy and crowdfunding mechanisms are driving our new world.

We are at a turning point in how we harness technology and innovation.

A new phase of innovation is upon us. It is much faster than the rapid adoption of smartphones and social networks during Web 2. Nowadays, most of the population has access to information, distributed gig-workers, and experiences via their smartphones.

Web 3 projects use staff on demand, community, and a crowd-based mechanism to fund and support their ideas via crypto tokens. These tokens have been used as means of exchange, store of value, access to services, and more recently they have been used to govern projects, incentivize behaviors, and recognize community members. Furthermore, the NFTs (not-fungible-tokens) now represent digital collectibles in art, music, and games. For example, participants of the Axie game perform tasks that add value to their ecosystem, and they are rewarded with a digital asset in the form of NFTs that can be sold and converted into an income stream. Tokens are allowing innovators to capture economic value in open ecosystems.

Therefore, Web 3 is creating the incentive structures required to solve the world’s biggest problems. The access to technology and resources not previously available is unlocking intelligent and innovative people worldwide to solve their biggest problems, moreover, these people have dealt with the problems they are trying to fix for years and are therefore more motivated than companies or governments who have pledged to fix them. Additionally, very soon we will have trillions of machines and individuals connected to the Internet that will, in many cases, communicate and transact among them without human interaction.

Distributed Innovation

Together with Fluid Chains, we have been launching high-impact businesses with exponential scaling on top of the distributed innovation trend during the past five years. We have embraced the open-source movement and we have enabled cities and communities to co-create token economies. In addition, we have built distributed ledger platforms for the creator’s economy, launched decentralized services, and built Proof of Concepts within fintech, energy, logistics, health, and other industries.

We know that successful blockchain or distributed ledger projects are Exponential Organizations by design and require a distributed innovation approach. They harness Community, Algorithms, and Engagement attributes to connect with abundance, and scale through Interfaces, Experiments, Autonomy, and Social ExO [5] attributes.

In the new world of Web 3.0, no one can afford to be self-sufficient. We need to bring together more and better resources than those we can have inside our organizations. We should attract the best people to collaborate on our projects. Thus, to attract elite members to participate and create value, it is essential to offer them a fair share of the value created.

To succeed in an era where networks are becoming economies, and where it is challenging to negotiate based on differing objectives, risk appetite, and power, we need to be open and learn new models and approaches.

We need to be agile, learn fast and fail fast; we need to organize work effectively in communities and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) through Massive Transformative purposes (MTP).

We need to leverage a culture of autonomy driven by a growth mindset and a clear purpose. It is essential to embrace social tools and decentralized governance as vehicles for asynchronous collaboration, and decision-making among diverse groups of individuals working online with no centralized leadership.

Web 1 websites started as news boards, catalogs, and directories; then became portals, mail services, and e-commerce. Today they are social networks, Software as a Services (SaaS), and sharing economies platforms. Web 3 digital tokens are the new website in our wallets’ addresses the new access credentials, moving forward, we will see more and more use cases we are not imaging today.

How can you help your business tap into this unprecedented access to innovation and harness it for benefit?

Based on my experience, I recommend educational and experiential learning. The leadership and the functional teams need to gain a new mindset, leadership skills, and capabilities. I strongly suggest participating in one of the thousands of Web 3 projects solving specific problems related to your industry or your personal passions. You can start by joining their communities and experimenting to learn with everyone else.

Another good idea is to bring experts to help you and your team identify transformational initiatives that enhance your organization’s current business model. They can also help to identify distributed innovative projects that could potentially disrupt your business and your industry.

You should be open to partnering with incubators and accelerators and even investing in Web 3 projects that have already found market-fit for a problem/solution aligned with your organization’s purpose.

We are writing down our future, be the first to write it. Those who arrive first will be rewarded, the laggards will fall behind. This thought was brought by teaching my grandfather passed to me many years ago “el que pega primero, pega dos veces.

Are you planning to leverage distributed innovation in your business today? How will you do it? I’d love to continue the conversation.

[1] Article Published at RollingStone.com

[2] Bankless Podcast with Chris Dixon

[3]  Peter Diamandis, best-selling author, public speaker, and philanthropist

[4]  Realm10.com

[5] Exponential Organizations

Together, we can accomplish more.

With a shared goal, we can unlock more digital value for our customers.
Escalate Group is committed to the Exponential Organization framework and proactively leverage the community and Crowd attribute for many functions traditionally handled inside the enterprises, including idea generation, funding, design, software development, distribution, marketing, and sales.


The Microsoft Partner Network is a hub of people, resources, and offerings that give Escalate Group everything we need to build and deliver successful solutions for our customers. We use the network to train our team, create innovative solutions, differentiate in the marketplace, and importantly connect with new customers. Together, we can accomplish more.

Partnering with Microsoft

“As a Microsoft partner, Escalate Group has instant access to exclusive resources, programs, tools, and connections. We are excited to be part of a community designed to foster business growth.” – Olga Calvache, Co-founder at Escalate Group.
Our experience with the Microsoft community goes beyond the transaction. It is a community built around a common purpose that attracts and engaged passionate members. It is about peer2peer engagement in live and online training and events that nurture the community. The interactions around the partner center platform, the co-marketing and the co-selling programs with other partners automate the peer-to-peer engagement.


There must be a better way to organize ourselves. We’ve learned how to scale technology; now it’s time we determine how to scale organizations. Community and Crowd go beyond outsourcing. We believe that Community and Crowd is a fundamental attribute, you cannot be an Exponential Organization if you do not leverage this attribute as part of your organization.

We are at the “Conecta B2B live” fair from May 11 to 31

At Escalate group, we are proud to partake in the first virtual fair “Connecta B2B Live” organized with the support of the communities: Construir, IT NOW, and Mercados & Tendencias. The event unites companies from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. It serves companies seeking to renew themselves, boost their businesses, train new entrepreneurs, and generate new prospects by creating a space to share and network with clients.

We invite you to visit our stand in the Rutanio pavilion, where groups of companies likes ours, form the innovation ecosystem of the city of Medellín-Colombia.

The event has conferences and workshops delivered by more than 150 speakers. Among them, Escalate group with talks about Blockchain: A World of Opportunities by César Castro and Customer-Centered approach to innovation by Olga Calvache. In addition, the workshop MTP, Massive Transformative Purpose. You can find the replay of our conferences in our YouTube channel: https://rebrand.ly/xrudb30

The fair has been a success and has extended its presence one more week until May 31. So far, more than 15,000 visitors have registered. The registration is free and gives access to talks, workshops, networking rooms, and learn from the offers of more than 40 booths.

Do not miss out this experience: https://www.connectab2b.live/