For too long, the healthcare industry’s silos and dispersed data have created numerous pain points, with problems so large that the prognosis has been poor, at best.

Today, however, the model may be shifting – offering many opportunities. Building on the models put forward by EY (“When the human body is the biggest data platform, who will capture value?”) and elsewhere, the Healthcare 1.0 model was a traditional pipeline value chain, focused on creating blockbuster products and optimizing R&D productivity. Healthcare 2.0 saw the emergence of healthcare networks as consolidation intensified – a model based on Team-based-care and a cross-disciplinary approach. Emerging technologies created more opportunities for scalability and collaboration – but pain points engendered by a fragmented approach remained. Healthcare 3.0 saw a shift towards patient centricity, the emergence of value-based models due to cost pressures, and, as a result, newly diversified portfolios which served different segments of the market, leading in many cases to complex portfolios and brand architectures.

Healthcare 4.0 Takes Shape

Now the pace is accelerating toward Healthcare 4.0 – a future driven by data, collaboration, and new value creation models. In this model, the value creation method is fundamentally changed – it is no longer based on optimizing transactions (e.g. a new drug developed, marketed and sold to providers and end users). Instead, it relies on the power of data to enhance every step of the process so that the value creation model is not based on transactions anymore, but on interactions that generate data and therefore allow the creation of shared value across the ecosystem. This model is what Erich Joachimsthaler calls an Interaction Field.

At its core, an interaction field is dependent on key interactions within the context of the healthcare industry — including, for instance, patients and healthcare providers, exchanging data in the course of these interactions. This is what we call the Nucleus of the interaction field – the first step towards creating an ecosystem.  

An Ecosystem then gets built around this core, which might include health tech companies, medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, hospital systems, professional associations, and other groups. Beyond that, Market Makers will enable velocity in the field by exerting influence. These could include government agencies, equipment suppliers, educational institutions, and foundations or nonprofit organizations. Over time, as the field expands, it creates more shared value.  

According to EY: “To create value now and in the future, life sciences companies should consider participating in data-centric platforms of care that improve individual health outcomes and reduce costs. In this environment, platforms provide a framework to create future value that is based on individualized outcomes, and is amplified by the ability to connect, combine and share data.”

Going forward, data can be used to both create universal standards of care, and to offer more personalized treatment and help deliver precision medicine – in particular in the context of blockchain and Web3 where data can be controlled not just by institutions but by patients themselves, ultimately breaking the barriers that exist to sharing it. 

Harnessing the power of data produced by interactions across the ecosystem, interaction fields have the ability to address and solve new, emerging or previously unsolved problems. This is because problems of this magnitude require collaboration from players across the ecosystem, enabled by data. No one player, company, technology or system has the ability to tackle these problems on their own.  

McKinsey acknowledges, “Today’s connected health technology landscape includes a wide array of apps and a dispersed set of data sources, but to fully exploit the benefits, the provision of solutions and the collection and application of data need to shift from fragmented ‘silos’ to an integrated ‘ecosystem’ of players.” (“Capturing Value From Connected Health”)

Why Healthcare is Ripe for Disruption by Interaction Fields 

A siloed industry, with disconnected sources of data, leading to a disjointed patient experience, healthcare is ripe for disruption by interaction fields. In research that Vivaldi conducted among health care providers (HCPs), they shared feeling isolated, not just when faced with complex patient cases, but also in adapting to evolving requirements and changing models.  

Scattered patient data, a disconnection from outcomes, and one-size-fits-all treatments — all these factors create the opportunity for a sea change.  

There are several criteria that make an industry particularly well-suited for an interaction field, and healthcare presents a number of these. These criteria were examined in the BCG article “Do You Need a Business Ecosystem?”

1. A high proportion of information to value creation. Traditionally, the diagnostic model relied on unstructured data – the judgment call of an HCP. New technologies and analysis tools – such as AI-guided imaging – require the use of databases where this data can be stored and analyzed, typically dissociated from EHR because patient data needs to be de-identified. In an aggregate form, data allows the extraction of patterns – identifying how a patient condition presents itself, spotting patterns, increasingly with the help of AI – and matching treatment options in a way that allows the measuring and weighing of risk of different courses of action. In turn, pattern identification tools and AI can develop learning effects, optimizing future interactions. More data leads to smarter insights, improved pattern identification, and ultimately better outcomes for patients. As a result, an increasing proportion of value is derived from data rather than assets such as equipment and technology. This is evidenced, for instance, in the imaging market where the value of imaging equipment is increasingly enhanced by AI that guides usage and interpretation. One example among many is GE’s decision to acquire BK medical, providing AI-guided surgery – its largest acquisition in years.  

2. Unpredictability. Healthcare has been undergoing rapid market evolution – and yet there is also substantial inertia across the system. The interplay between these two factors creates unpredictability, another pre-condition of the rise of interaction fields. The swift pace of technology development and adoption creates new opportunities for participants in the healthcare ecosystem, and even accommodates different paces of change.  

3. Malleability. Utilizing healthcare data requires a customizable approach. Ultimately, the opportunity is in defining personalized paths based on patterns identified through aggregated patient data – something that is already being explored in genomics and will be further enabled by AI.  

4. High modularity. A high degree of modularity is an intrinsic characteristic of a fragmented industry – disparate steps of the process that create a disjointed patient experience. An interaction field has the ability to bring together different aspects of care or steps of the value chain – in a network rather than hierarchical model.  

5. Intrinsic need for collaboration. The healthcare ecosystem requires that various participants work together – something that glaringly does not happen today. Systematic issues cannot be resolved by any one entity, but require cooperation from the likes of healthcare providers, hospitals, health tech companies, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, and patients themselves. Beyond that, further collaboration is needed from educational institutions, equipment suppliers, foundations and nonprofits, government entities and regulatory agencies. 

This model of collaboration can solve complex problems that no single entity could resolve, as well as create new market opportunities and spaces for innovation. Interaction fields are well suited for industries that have a high need for coordinated components. Enhancing collaboration can lead to improved outcomes for patients and better processes. 

Types of Emerging Interaction Fields  

For the various sets of interactions, different types of interaction fields are already emerging. There are four key types that are currently developing: 

1. Real World Data and Health Data Companies: These companies are collaborating to revolutionize how patient data is shared and turned into insights. This data might include electronic health records and doctors’ notes. The Real World Evidence (RWE) Alliance, for instance, is a group of healthcare companies that are working to make real world data and evidence more accessible so that more informed care decisions and regulatory policies are possible. Another company, Datavant, also looks to aggregate vast amounts of patient data to develop smarter insights. Datavant brings fragmented data together across thousands of organizations to create a complete picture of patient health, but, as expected, still has some limitations on access to data.  

2. Personalized and Relevant Solutions: Organizations in this type are leveraging their capabilities and insights to produce smarter patient solutions in real time at a lower cost. For example, Aetion has a platform that analyzes data from real world evidence, which can be used by providers to develop better patient solutions, and during the height of the Covid crisis, helped provide solutions directly to the FDA.

3. Foster Collaboration Amongst Care Teams: This type of interaction field can bring care teams closer together, regardless of geography. The company Owkin is aggregating data to produce insights for drug discovery and development. Through cloud capabilities compliant with patient privacy measures, they are able to work with numerous hospitals, universities, and life science companies to accelerate drug development, optimize clinical trials, and identify patient populations of interest.

4. Foster Collaboration Amongst Patients: With access to aggregated data, patients themselves can connect through online forums or other platforms to discuss conditions and treatments, provide support, and enable others to utilize health systems in a way that delivers more positive patient connections and outcomes. PatientsLikeMe is one such forum. Based on aggregated data, patients are brought together with others who have similar problems or conditions, enabling them to seek solutions in a smarter way, and allowing health systems to get more positive patient connections and outcomes as a result.

5. Sharing Insights with Patients: Analytics are as advanced as ever, and healthcare might allow for providers to have as detailed a look as ever into what may be happening to their bodies and what may be the best course of action to help treat them.  Included Health is an example of a company looking to become a one stop shop in the digital health world to provide these services, as they offer personalized guidance for patients in everyday and urgent care, primary care, behavioral health, and specialty care.  

While the HealthTech market has yet to shake out, large healthcare players are increasingly vying for the interaction field opportunity. Corinne Dive-Reclus, Head of Lab Insights at Roche Information Solutions has said, “With the use of digital healthcare ecosystems, we can, together and right now, innovate to change lives quickly and effectively for all.” And Pfizer’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Lidia Fonseca, has referred to health care as a “team sport.”  

To help build health tech innovation pipelines, Novartis introduced the Novartis Biome digital innovation lab, and Merck launched Merck Digital Sciences Studio. Pfizer has been introducing AI-powered tools and apps as part of its Pfizer Digital Companion platform, and has partnered with a robotics company to deliver medications to remote areas via drone. Roche is pursuing a digital ecosystem to better unify data, with the goal of creating more personalized care. And Eli Lilly and Company has been collaborating with technology companies, including Apple, to work on solutions for health diagnoses and management. 

As we move further into this Healthcare 4.0 era, the focus is on data-driven healthcare ecosystems: data, analytics, and insights shared across participants to find, and create, new forms of value. The opportunity for key healthcare players is to assess their role – participate or assume a leading role in shaping the ecosystem. Ultimately, the opportunity is larger than ecosystems within specific areas of healthcare or data aggregation; it is in what is being called the “platform of platforms” or “Interaction Field of Interaction Fields,” bringing together all different ecosystems within healthcare into one meta-ecosystem.  

While it is clear that emerging Interaction Fields will pivot and evolve multiple times, the key questions will be how the future value chain shifts, which players will bring the ecosystem together, and who will be at the center. One can only hope it will ultimately be the patient.

The post Building An Interaction Field In The Healthcare Industry appeared first on Vivaldi.

In The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society (2020) and our research since mid-2015, we traced the modern evolution of business enterprises, from a world dominated by big, traditional, asset-heavy, command-and-control “value chain” companies like GE and GM, through several phases, the first being dominated by early-Internet “platform” firms like Amazon and Google, the second being the social and mobile era which catapulted Apple forward, and created social networks such as Facebook. Today, these phases are often described as Web1 and Web2. The first two phases have been well described as the phases where platform companies grew, the emergence of the platform economy or the platform revolution.[1] In 2020, we contended that we are entering a third phase, the world of metaverse and Web3 technologies, a future where a new type of firm, namely “interaction field” companies will flourish.[2]

Web1 and Web2 had a profound impact on how companies create value and how they achieve competitive advantage. Until then, strategy evolved around deciding where to compete and how to compete in a market. Good strategy was about choosing a market and establishing barriers to entry such as building strong brands or establishing customer switching costs. Competition was essentially a way of competing in a World of Walls. Web1 and Web2 changed this world for companies and brands. Today, competition takes place in a World of Webs where everything connects: things, people, machines and companies and more — a world of hyperconnectivity. Industry or category boundaries have blurred, and barriers of entry have become as porous. We believe that the metaverse will accelerate this world of connectivity, and Web3 technologies will put the World of Web in overdrive and create the convergence of all sorts of worlds: the virtual world, the real world, or the mirror world, which is essentially the real world in digital form.

Interaction field companies will reach their prime in these worlds. A defining difference between “interaction field” and “value chain” and “platform” companies is that interaction field firms view consumers or users not as targets, audiences to capture, or a source of transactions to be aggregated but they see consumers as a system and part of a complex network of relationships, from close-in family and friends to society at large. In this network or system, every consumer has his or her own set of goals that ladder up to values and beliefs. Consumers perform a set of activities to achieve these goals and priorities in the context of their daily lives. Value creation is about solving the challenges and problems of consumers as they seek to optimize the range of actions and activities they must perform to achieve their goals.[3] Interaction fields then optimize this entire system, ranging from consumers’ daily goals to broader and more important challenges of society.

A second difference is that interaction field companies open up their most important customer relationships to a wide range of stakeholders and third parties who provide new value in the field. This contrasts with value chain and platform companies who are hoarding and aggregating massive data pools in their internal systems such as their CRM or secured customer data platforms. For example, take a platform such as Uber, or an ecosystem such as Airbnb. Essentially these firms hoard transactions and data from riders and drivers, or from travelers and hosts, and they optimize their businesses to extract maximum value for themselves.

Interaction field companies instead create a nucleus of interactions with customers or consumers with maximum value, and then build an open architecture around it that attracts partners and third parties to create shared value for everyone. Marshall van Alstyne and Geoff Parker call this the inverted firm, where a firm seeks to externalize value creation to others by designing interactions and rules of governance accordingly.[4]

John Deere for example built a network of farmers who ride on Deeres, who share data from the health of a plant in the field to overall farm productivity. Instead of hoarding the data on its secure cloud servers, John Deere enriches the data and makes it available to fertilizer or crop suppliers, and a broad range of others that create value – solving major challenges that farmers and consumers face from making farms profitable, reducing water depletion, and ensuring healthy and sufficient food supply around the world. Interaction field companies maximize interactions in an entire field of value creation. Platform companies instead like to own the transactions, and own the customer.

A third no less important attribute of interaction field firms is that they motivate interactions far beyond their existing industries, such as agriculture or automotive. They encourage value creation through partnerships, platforms and ecosystems across different industries, sectors or categories. Ant Group’s nucleus is Alipay for example, but it operates a number of platforms and ecosystems that have emerged and sit on the top of payments including lending, wealth management and even health insurance and many others. In a way, it makes the traditional concept of categories and industries irrelevant, since value creation is achieved across new market spaces that are defined around consumer or even societal challenges.[5] This means automotive companies solve for mobility, not just selling a better car.

In short, interaction field companies change the nature of value creation for consumers, beyond mere fulfillment of needs and emphasizing relevant attributes through branding, or hurling new products and services in the name of innovation at consumers. In the interaction field, consumers innovate for themselves, they solve problems, collaborate with companies and create competitive advantage for them. They assume an active role in value creation. They change the way companies are configured beyond just the optimizing of their functions or their own activities along the value chain, and they change the way they create value beyond existing industry or traditional category boundaries.

Now, let’s peer into the metaverse after donning an “interaction field” lens. The firms vying to build and equip consumers to enter the metaverse are primarily platform companies or ecosystems like Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Apple, and all the other tech giants that supply the essential tools such as Nvidia. Much like German immigrant Levi Strauss sold workman’s clothing, today known as Levi’s jeans, to hopeful farmers during the California Gold Rush in the 1870s, purer-play virtual reality firms like the online game platforms Roblox or Minecraft or the Ethereum-based environments such as Decentraland of The Sandbox aren’t any better. Their primary channel of value creation is through aggregating transactions, building large audiences of players that become gullible consumers or users susceptible to monetization via in-app purchases or by issuing and selling tokens. They too merely optimize their own worlds, rather than enabling meaningful interactions, sharing them, and creating value for everyone.

Decentralization

As for the most fundamental societal challenge Web3 enthusiasts are seeking to solve, the pathetic reality is that the lion’s share of the value on which the tech giants’ staggering market capitalizations are currently based on comes from their proprietary ownership of the data generated by their own customers. As I noted in Newsweek, “The dominant digital platform model that Big Tech uses represents a fundamental mismatch between the value they derive from the day-to-day gusher of data generated by their billions of customers, and the value to those customers—that means all of us—of the products and services they profess to provide for free.”[6]

The World Economic Forum observes that the decentralization of platforms is destined to broaden the value base of beneficiaries of data generators, who will in time graduate into full-fledged data owners:

Web3…harnesses blockchain [technology] to “decentralize” management, thereby reducing the control of big corporations, such as Google or Meta, and making it more democratic. It is defined by open-source software, is trustless – doesn’t require the support of a trusted intermediary – and is permissionless (it has no governing body).[7]

That an overwhelming share of the value generated by cryptocurrencies and NFTs – the first most visible manifestation of Web3 – has so far accrued to assorted celebrities, crypto snake oil salesmen, and sports stars is not promising. As the cryptocurrency boom seems likely to end in a big bust, what are we to make of Web3’s aspirations to become the vehicle for more fairly distributing the inherent value of data through the magic of decentralized blockchain technology?

For starters, in a Web3 world, your activities and the data they generate would no longer be hosted on proprietary servers owned by Google or Amazon, which use them to harvest the value from it (i.e., sell advertising that targets you) but on networks of computers using blockchain. Web3 transactions will be conducted not in fiat currency (which benefits intermediaries such as banks who extract fees) but through your crypto-wallet and websites hosted through decentralized applications, or “dapps.”

Sangeet Paul Choudary, one of the leading scholars of the merits and demerits of the platform economy, considers the advent of Web3 as promising an alternative model, or “organizing mechanism,” to now-dominant platform firms like Google, Meta, and Amazon. In his view, these platforms’ primary shortcomings are their propensity for mass standardization as opposed to customization:

The largest businesses today – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Airbnb and others – aggregate a market around their platform…and standardize the core interaction supported by the platform. The purchase experience for a book is not too different from the purchase experience for an item of clothing on a horizontal online marketplace. This standardization helps achieve scale…however, standardizing the core interaction…involves a trade-off: the loss of end-user context.[8]

Loss of end-user context means failure to solve the problems and challenges that consumers as a system have.

Interaction field firms have a different architecture from platform companies. An illustrative example is the difference between Google and Tesla. Google’s business model is based on selling ads at nearly infinite scale to users of its search engine. You are the product. Period. End of story.

Tesla’s network of charging stations

Tesla’s open architecture drives ecosystem innovation. The firm’s success is not at its core derived from its ability to build a better, faster, or cheaper electric car although the automotive industry and major competitors appear to believe so. In the interaction field model, the primary source of value and innovation is on the demand side, not the supply side. Tesla’s interlocking ecosystems include its Supercharger charging network, which in Europe is accessible to all EV drivers. In May 2022, Tesla announced plans to open its Supercharger network in the U.S. to all EV drivers as well. As Elon Musk commented, “We’re trying as best as possible to do the right thing for the advancement of electrification, even if that diminishes our competitive advantage.” This open architecture benefits not just the global community of EV drivers but helps to accelerate the digital transformation and sustainability of the entire auto industry and other industries as well. Those drivers, in turn, collectively contribute data to a different system called Autopilot, as the data generated from every mile driven pushes Tesla closer to its ultimate goal of truly autonomous mobility. That data also connects the community of EV drivers to the California electric grid network, which lets owners of solar rooves share electricity with other owners of solar rooves, to power not just their Teslas but their houses. The data is the fuel of value creation — the open architecture its chassis.

Let’s look at LEGO from a similar perspective. The resident geniuses at LEGO HQ in Billund, Denmark are not the only drivers of the innovation that creates successive generations of LEGO sets. The company more heavily relies on an innovation ecosystem, a globally distributed network of partners and collaborators. One example is called LEGO IDEAS, which includes AFOLS (Adult Fans of LEGO), a community of fans, parents and kids like you and me that collectively co-creates innovation. After you put an idea up on LEGO’s website, if that idea gets 10,000 votes through social media, LEGO produces it and compensates the inventor. LEGO externalizes innovation and new idea generation beyond the company, in the spirit of the inverted firm in the platform economy.[9]

Van Gogh’s Starry Night, built with LEGO

Earlier this year, Kirkbi, the parent company of the LEGO Group, announced its entry into the metaverse in partnership with Fortnite-maker Epic Games. Their joint goal is to build a “kid-friendly metaverse.” Whether the kid-friendly metaverse that ensues will also be a Web3 enterprise, let alone an interaction field firm, is still very much TBD. That said, LEGO’s open architecture is a precursor to a potential convergence of the metaverse and Web3 in a virtual Legoland.

Glimpses and glimmerings of the vast store of value that transcends the feverish and adolescent speculative yearnings of the Bored Ape Yacht Club can be seen in the late 2020 launch by the Crop Sciences division of Bayer and enterprise blockchain provider BlockApps of the TraceHarvest Network. Its stated aim is to “set new standards in sustainability and drive digital transformation and food system resiliency that will shape the future of the agriculture industry.”[10]

These partners and collaborators comprise an ecosystem replete with powerful interaction field characteristics. The network is not just “the first blockchain solution of its kind to track and trace the full lifecycle of agricultural products starting at the seed source.” It is a shared open platform from which “farmers, manufacturers, distributors and processors can selectively share and review data within a single, secure platform, making activities available to the entire chain, and allowing all parties to identify and address product tracking and integrity issues faster than previous manual processes allowed…Member farmers, manufacturers, distributors and processors use the same TraceHarvest network to track where their products are going, providing them with full visibility and traceability into the source of their crops.”

Conclusions

Looking at the metaverse and Web3 merely from a technology perspective is not helpful. As Alex Cahana, partner at Ark Invest already said: “Technology does nothing. It is what people [emphasis added] do with technology that matters.”[11]

Looking at these metaverse and Web3 developments from a consumer, strategy and business perspective, as articulated in the interaction field model, reveals their enormous potential in creating value. By value, we mean solving new challenges, difficult and intractable problems of consumers and society, and creating new competitive advantages for collaborators. This leads to creating real and shared value for everyone.

In our world, value is not created through network effects alone, value is created through solving problems and challenges of consumers and society in the interaction field. What real, new and intractable problems does the metaverse or Web3 really solve?

It is difficult to foresee the many different paths of evolutions the metaverse and Web3 may take. We have three thoughts:

• A first critical path is the consumer and a deep understanding of the challenges and problems of consumers as a system – as an individual identity as part of society. The question not to ask is: what products or services do these new technologies create for consumers? Instead, the question to ask is: how do these technologies help to improve people’s lives? Do they solve something? Do they enable them? Do they give people time back?

Companies must understand the challenges and problems of people and society really, really well. Today, this is not the case. Most use cases don’t solve anything useful yet.[12] Technology is cumbersome and slow.

One of the great steps in this direction is related to the technologies that enable the building of digital identities using the Self-Sovereign Identity or SSI approach. What this really means is that consumers become data owners, giving them full control in their digital or crypto wallets. Even if you record your Peloton bike session with the Peloton digital app, it isn’t Peloton who owns the data, but you. This changes fundamentally how to think of consumers – as passive recipients or audiences of advertising, or as targets for a company’s products, or prospects to be converted. We are looking at technologies that enable consumers to become active participants in creating value, consumers who understand where and how to own their data, and how to share their data, whether it is a digital asset or piece of art via NFTs or the data that the rich metaverse or Web3 contexts enable to be collected on behalf of consumers.

This will be a significant departure from today. When consumers are truly involved in value creation, when they know how they can build the value, and can take their data anywhere they want to, and can co-create products and services, then it is very likely that startups, established companies or brands can build valuable use cases that have a major impact on consumer behavior. This will be a significant change from today’s value creation through aggregation of data, realizing network effects and monetizing the value creation as Facebook or Google practice, and most other platform businesses practice today.

• A second path we are looking into concerns the evolution regarding tokenization which will create an exponential increase in interaction velocity across an interaction field. This will clear the way for sharing of valuable data across a broader set of participants or partners with zero distance to consumers, a sort of value-creating network. Because the tokens are secured on distributed ledger technologies, or the blockchain using smart contracts, the distinction between internal versus external interactions becomes irrelevant. It will be a trusted system of value exchange. In the case of John Deere and agriculture, it is feasible that farmers create significant value for themselves via digital tokens, which they can convert into substantial cash, as a very large chain of partners and participants benefit in the process as food travels from the farm to the table of consumers.

• Finally, the third path that we are studying intensively concerns technologies that enable the formation of entirely new companies or organizations built on code and encrypted on the blockchain that create value in an interaction field. As value is created in the nucleus in the interactions between a company or brand and its consumers, and as these interactions are tokenized, this will enable new collaborations between existing platforms and traditional pipeline businesses but also new organizational forms such as “decentralized autonomous organizations” or DAOs. Brands can develop communities and reward customers for their engagement and involvement by issuing tokens. Would John Deere, for example, issue tokens or voting rights in exchange for farm productivity or profitability data from farmers? This would reward farmers for the value creation in agriculture and the food supply chain as described in “The Interaction Field” book in Chapter 2. Entire new organizations or communities can emerge that create and share value with other participants in the interaction field. These organizations could be organized around fundraising for major social missions or sharing projects, such as eradicating cancer or accelerating K-12 education or other major consumer and social issues. These types of DAOs could be structured as open protocols which enable everyone to participate that can create value.

In the third part of this series of three essays, we will describe several actual case studies in healthcare and education.

[1] “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You,” Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary, March 28, 2016.

[2] The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society; Erich Joachimsthaler, Public Affairs, 2020

[3] I have first articulated this notion in my second book: “Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your Company’s Next Big Growth Strategy,” Erich Joachimsthaler, 2007.

[4] Marshall W. Van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker (2021), “Digital Transformation Changes How Companies Create Value,” Harvard Business Review, December 17.

[5] I like the concept of growth domains or market spaces where companies solve similar consumer challenges and problems (see Joachimsthaler 2007). This idea was pioneered by Rita McGrath who speaks of competitive arenas where groups of market players apply similar strategies. “The End of Competitive Advantage,” Rita McGrath, Harvard Business Review, August 7, 2013.

[6] “Big Tech Must Respect What Consumers Want in the Post-Pandemic Era” Erich Joachimsthaler, Newsweek, 6/24/21

[7] “The Evolution of the Internet to Web3,” Rebecca King, Engagement Lead,” World Economic Forum, Feb 1, 2022

[8] Sangeet Paul Choudary, “The Building Blocks Thesis,” Vol. 1, Apr 26, 2022

[9] “Digital Transformation Changes How Companies Create Value,” Marshall W. Van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker, Harvard Business Review, Dec. 17, 2021.

[10] “BlockApps Launches Agribusiness Blockchain Network ‘TraceHarvest’ Following Success with Bayer” Press Release, Nov. 18, 2020

[11] The Future of Blockchain and Healthcare with Dr. Alex Cahana, ARK Invest, YouTube

[12] “Jorge Stolfi: ‘Technologically, bitcoin and blockchain technology is garbage’,” Jordi Perez Colome, El Pais, July 7, 2022.

The post The Metaverse Meets the Interaction Field Meets Web3 appeared first on Vivaldi.

Q: Who is the metaverse working for currently?

A: The metaverse right now works for scammers, criminals, bandits – people who are a bit unsavory, and perhaps for speculators or traders who have a lot of money to speculate or celebrities who buy a Bored Ape as a status symbol.

These new technologies have created a Wild West. The evolving question is — how does this create value to the consumer or society at large? How can a company or a brand then do good business? People who are not trying to speculate or scam somebody.

Q: Right now a lot of consumer brands are experimenting with the metaverse — what are the options for services or B2B companies? Is there a way they can engage at the present? 

A: One simple way that companies currently participate is to say if we do it here [in the real world], we should also be over there [in the metaverse]. Sort of like the old version of Second Life.

JP Morgan, for example, has Chase branch offices, and they recreated a branch office in the metaverse using the platform Decentraland. Or Gucci says if you like Gucci loafers in the real world and want to express yourself in the metaverse, maybe your avatar will have the same Gucci loafer, and you’ll pay a lot of money for it. Or there are advertising companies that say, hey, in the real world we do advertising on 5^th Avenue because a lot of consumers walk by, so we’ll create a giant billboard in the metaverse.

That’s where a lot of conversation is right now, which is not really constructive. People have started to build some things, but not a lot of activity is taking place — yet.

B2B companies will benefit from what’s called the industrial metaverse, which has recently been extensively discussed at the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Q: What do you think the inflection point will have to be, or what will have to happen technologically, to get us from where we are now, with marketing and entertainment leading the charge, to a future where businesses are better utilizing this new world?

A: There are a number of things that have to happen. The metaverse and Web 3.0 — it’s extremely slow. If you remember dial-up internet and AOL, where the screen would slowly fill up, that’s actually what’s happening with Web 3.0.

Another very important thing is the regulatory and legal framework. There are big problems right now – if you buy an NFT that is tied to a digital asset, the legal framework is not clear if you bought the copyright of something or merely the fair use. Legally with fair use, you can use it, but you don’t own it. The original owner still owns it. There’s no law right now.

In order to make the metaverse work for the rest of us, the speed and regulatory framework have to evolve fairly rapidly.

Q: There’s an idea that the decentralization that comes with Web 3.0 will give individuals more control over their personal data — what is the benefit of that for large companies or business services?

A: In Web 3, I have my identity on the blockchain, it’s encrypted and everything I put there stays there. I could have a digital wallet, an SSI [self-sovereign identity], and if I own that data, it’s spread across many computers: decentralized. It’s valuable because my data can be shared and aggregated and everybody can learn from the data. It isn’t just owned by one company.

I could create an NFT out of my data and every time I share it or provide access, I earn a token. I could connect my exercise routines, my eating habits, sleeping behavior, and then could use that data and buy health insurance. If I’m healthy, I could use it to get a reduction in insurance.

Right now, the value is exploited by companies that capture data, like Facebook and Google, via annoying advertising. In the future, decentralization will democratize things. I can create a value out of my data and trade or gift it. It creates value to companies because they can create better products and services based on the data. As I wrote in my book, it’s about winners share all, not winners take all. In the future the consumer becomes a lot more powerful.

Q: In Web 2, we’ve been in an era of deep “personalization” or something that’s been sold to us as “personalization,” and maybe what’s being advocated for in the future is a level of aggregation that allows for better overall products, even if they seem less “personalized”?

A: Personalization right now isn’t really personalization. Today it is about a limited context such as past purchases. It’s almost lost its original intent. Web 3 promises that it becomes real personalization — because I’m in charge of serving myself. Companies will only attract customers and business if they can truly understand the context and daily life of consumers. As I’ve said many times before, if content is king, context is King Kong.

Q: Do you see health tech or health care as being the industry that could benefit the most or most quickly from these new developments?

A: Health care is a big one because it’s extremely fragmented. One doctor in a hospital doesn’t know what another doctor in the same hospital on a different floor is doing. Never mind a doctor across the country. There’s an incredible fragmentation. With the aggregation of data, people start benefiting from each other.

Q: You’ve made the prediction that the cryptocurrency boom may end in a bust — do you foresee cryptocurrency reaching a level of stabilization, or serving as a testing ground for the blockchain, or something else?

A: Crypto is a financial instrument and that means it attracts criminals, scammers and speculators – in a good way and a bad way. Those practices will have to clear themselves out with the regulatory and legal frameworks. I think what will be left is an infrastructure that is far more efficient and effective than what we have now, which is a few banks controlling the banking system. In the metaverse, it’s permissionless; there are no intermediaries which charge you a fee for transfers. Money will be able to travel from me to you without any friction. That really creates consumer benefit. I’m bullish on crypto, and bearish on crypto as a speculative tool.

Q: Is there some inherent value to being the “first” in these new spaces? 

A: The standard recommendation by consultants and ad agencies is that you need to be participating and experimenting, and I think that’s a bit of a self-serving recommendation. Ad agencies tell you that so they can help you do that. I don’t necessarily think that’s the right recommendation.

At Vivaldi, we think differently. You have to figure out how to create real and meaningful value to consumers and create a competitive advantage for your company and brand. It’s better to start with: “Who is my customer? What is my product or service? How do we create value?” and then make decisions from that vantage point. Thinking about your business and framing it from your business perspective is a more thoughtful and practical approach to participating, rather than buying a lot of real estate on Decentraland just to have a presence there or hoping consumers will eventually come. Being first isn’t really the value, it’s being first in providing a meaningful benefit for consumers, that should be the value.

GLOSSARY:

The metaverse: A 3D immersive environment that exists both physically and virtually, built on Web 3.0 technologies.

Web 3.0: The third generation of the internet, which utilizes blockchain technology, operating in a decentralized way and a host of other technologies.

Blockchain: A list of securely linked records distributed digitally over a peer-to-peer network and publicly displayed as a ledger of timestamped transactions.

NFT: A non-fungible token, i.e. a unique digital element that exists as part of the Ethereum blockchain.

Cryptocurrency: A digital or virtual form of currency secured by cryptography, distributed in a decentralized method.

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Types of emerging Interaction Field Models

What types of interaction fields are emerging in Education?

1. Platforms for unbundled courses

One of the most prominent phenomena is of course the rise of platforms such as Coursera, whose $7bn IPO is a testimony to the enduring business opportunity in Interaction Field models. A community of 87 million learners and over 200 universities, Coursera opens up access for students and enables professors or institutions to reach wider audiences, creating a larger market opportunity for all. The Science of Well Being by Yale professor Laurie Santos, has been taken by 3.38 million students. Such Interaction Fields might well be pointing to the future of education, by allowing students to assemble their own set of courses best suited for the professional and life paths they set for themselves. Some courses could potentially be taken directly from potential employers such as Google who also offer certificates and some could be taken from educational institution such as Stanford or MIT who now offer the majority of their courses online for free.  As a result, Interaction Fields could potentially play a role in the deconstruction of the educational landscape. The emergence of such platforms will lead to a star instructor system – somewhat akin to stars gaining independence from the Hollywood studio system – where some instructors will be able to garner audiences in the millions and will enjoy significant popularity around the world, creating even more viral and network effects.

2. Information Exchanges

The rise of student-centric information exchange Interaction Fields has been a defining trend of the past years. Chegg, Quizlet and Course Hero allow students contribute study sets that they can share publicly to help others build their knowledge and also answer specific questions directly – a little too directly if you follow the controversy on cheating.

While these Interaction Fields are primarily focused on students, they also include other types of participants. For instance, instructors can create study sets to share with their students and track their student’s progress. Content creators can partner with Quizlet to become Verified Creators – combining their content with Quizlet’s study tools and selling that content to schools or directly to students. As such, it is expected to learner information exchanges are only the starting point and will try to scale up to include more and more audiences over time.

3. Learning Networks

The second model seems to be emerging to counter the fear that technology might eliminate community. For instance, Prisma, started by former Google execs, defines itself as a “connected learning network” cultivating independence and joy of learning. It allows individual learners already on the K-12 level to form community. This is how Prisma describes its ecosystem: “It consists of a small cohort of diverse kids learning virtually together with the support and guidance of dedicated learning coaches and a network of these cohorts spread around the world where learners can make friendships, collaborate and share ideas. Our vision is that learners get the best of both worlds: the intimacy and support of a “one-room schoolhouse” (the cohort) and the breadth, diversity and global perspective of the world’s largest kid-focused learning community (the network)”. Such an Interaction Field model is predicated on creating learning and network effects among the different cohorts as these exchange ideas and best practices.

4. Conversational Learning

Conversation Learning is an entire category of Interaction Fields, predicated on creating viral and network effects by drawing students into great conversations. Kialo, Parlay or Packback invite students into debates on often open-ended questions – from neuroscience, we know that asking big, open-ended questions makes learning more motivating.

Discord takes this models model even further by creating micro-tribes within larger networks – students can join groups around particular topics or Silent study rooms (keep your camera on) holding them accountable for silent study, reminding them to take breaks and recording session time for leaderboards; study bots help students meet deadlines. Discord is essentially akin to a monitored study hall, where students can ask for help, join competitions and be held accountable for time.

5. Mentorship and Support Networks

Matching learners with support – from instructors, real world experts, or peers – is a problem Interaction Fields are particularly well suited to solve. Brainly allows students to tap into the brainpower of thousands of experts worldwide by asking them questions. Piazza, on the contrary, focuses on micro-communities on the college or course level.

Online tutoring platforms such as Knack, Vygo, Skooli or Tutit create Interaction Fields matching students with support, be it from tutors or peers; Peerceptiv is focused on creating a virtual cycle of feedback on writing and analytics that set the stage for collaboration between students and instructors.

6. Creator Economy

One of the enduring misunderstandings about Interaction Fields is that these simply replicate relationships and interactions happening offline. Instead, the more interesting aspect of Interaction Fields is solving new problems and enabling new interactions – one example are the new needs that come along with the emerging Creator Economy. These Interaction Fields enable students to be not just recipients  or even interpreters of information – and not just tutors or mentors – but also creators and authors in their own right. For instance, Scratch is a  platform where students can program interactive stories, games, and animations, and share creations with others. GoConqr is a social learning platform – offering an array of learning tools for students and educators to create and share study resources in innovative ways.

7. Innovation Labs

Finally, one of the enduring values of Interaction Fields across industries is to facilitate the exchange of ideas and best practices. Curio is an online platform for educators to discover, curate, and collaborate to find new ideas to transform education. Among teacher-centric platforms, Online community of teachers to collaborate and share best practices/methods for teaching – join community groups, ask questions (anonymously or not), connect with others through private messages.

Most of these merging Interaction Fields aim to leverage both direct network effects (students pulling in other students) as well as indirect ones (e.g. higher quality support or tutors attracting more participants); supply side ones (the scale of the offering attracting better quality) as well as demand ones (learners increasingly dependent on the network in order to learn, work on homework and prepare for tests). The question is, of course, which particular players are likely to quickly build scale and viral effects – and those are largely rooted in the ability of these Interaction Fields to create learning effects, in particular from data that will allow them to improve their offering as they go.

What to expect going forward – Emerging opportunities in Interaction Fields

Finally the fourth question is which other models are likely to emerge going forward.

We are likely to see the emergence of super-platforms – “platforms of platforms” that include serve a variety of complex needs that build on each other and as such can build scale more quickly. We expect that this can happen by acquisition from established players, as well as by building additional capabilities to serve more full-spectrum needs.

On the other end of the spectrum, a typical phenomenon as Interaction Fields grow is to see a subdivision by sub-tries or micro-communities that ensure a more functional model and tighter connections that can be found in a large scale network. Examples can be seen within Reddit, for instance, that became structured as a series of smaller sub-communities. In education, a key goal and pain point is to ensure high-quality, productive conversations and to weed out the “noise” – this can be achieved in potentially forming high-powered, topic-centered academic communities that allow deeper conversations and engagement with the subject matter in a more productive way.

A potentially under-served audience are instructors – even though Interaction Fields are increasingly offering tools to serve this audience as well.  It will be interesting to see in the coming years the emergence of more Interaction Fields that specifically serve instructors, allowing them to extract patterns that work, explore different approaches and ultimately try to create new models. Some of these Interaction Fields might serve the emerging disintermediation and the need for instructors to reinvent themselves outside of existing institutional boundaries, creating a following not just among learners but among instructors themselves – and also feel less isolated in a profession that is constantly changing. There is already movement in the direction – for instance, Outschool allows teachers in K-12 to create their own courses, and Teachers Helping Teachers allows to exchange educational materials and ideas. We expect to see more movement and scale in that space.

A critical audience will also be institutions. These will have an increasing need for exchange in information, best practices, resources – a mid, in Higher Ed, falling enrollment and rising attrition, a talent war for burning out faculty.  This area is perhaps the most emerging one, and it will be interesting to see how the industry evolves in the future, including potential data, best practices or even capabilities exchange as the traditional value chain is becoming reconfigured.

Ultimately, we see the rise of learning data companies that will leverage big data residing in the many technology platforms to continuously optimize the learning or teaching process, identify patterns that work best  – not just generally but also for each specific learner or challenge type, as well as institutional patterns, challenges or cultural constructs.

As a summary, Interaction Fields represent a large and rising opportunity in Education – as evidenced by the many Interaction Fields already in play or in formation. Interaction Fields make sense from an industry structure point of view, and will allow to find new ways to tackle big, previously unsolved problems – not just for specific audiences, but rather bringing together different market participants in the search for solutions.

Perhaps one of the problems – or the opportunities – is that Education was until recently often considered an individual, solitary activity. In this context, Interaction Fields can open many doors to creating value. After all, one perspective on learning is it was always about a form of interaction with other minds, present or past, synchronous or asynchronous.  So what industry can be better suited to creating interaction shield stand the space that gave rise to Socratic discussion?

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Businesses like Airbnb and Uber shifted the paradigm in their respective industries from leveraging physical assets such as hotels or cars, to bringing together drivers and riders, travelers and owners, to create value through exchange. This phenomenon, which goes beyond these examples and is reshaping entire industries and creating new kinds of successful businesses, has been described by Vivaldi’s founder and CEO Erich Joachimsthaler in his book The Interaction Field.

This series will be of interest to any industry observer looking to pick up on emerging patterns of demand, and to the practitioner looking to spot opportunities for innovation or investment. To kick-off, Vivaldi Senior Partner Anne Olderog looks at why education is ripe for disruption by Interaction Fields.

Why Education is ripe for disruption by Interaction Fields

In Education, there has been a shift from an ‘authoritative’ top-down model to a ‘lateral’ or ‘peer-to peer’ model. We no longer think only in terms of a transfer from a “knowledgeable adult” to a “tabula rasa” learner. Students don’t simply learn to process and regurgitate information that they may or may not use later. They also  learn to develop meta skills such as formulating and defending a point of view, persuading others or appreciating perspectives from others.

The education business model has changed. Education has a high propensity to shift from a traditional (“pipeline”) one-to-many model to a many-to-many ecosystem where learning comes from everywhere and everyone. What has not yet been studied are the structural factors in education that create the conditions for disruption by an Interaction Field.

The BCG article, “Do You Need a Business Ecosystem,” examined several criteria that make an industry well-suited for an interaction field. Education industry presents a number of these:

1.     Modularity.

“In contrast to vertically integrated models or hierarchical supply chains, in business ecosystems, the components of the offering are designed independently yet function as an integrated whole. In many cases, the customer can choose among the components and/or how they are combined.”

Education is a prime example of an ecosystem where the key components are designed independently and yet need to function as a whole – from understanding, assessment, practice and ultimately application

In our research, a key problem from the student perspective is actually the dissociation of these key steps. Learning is often dissociated from practical application. Understanding is separate from practice. Academic concepts fail to be brought back to practical world problems.

The same is true from the instructor or institutional perspective. Teaching basic concepts is separate from assessing student understanding or even basic preparation. This is a well-known problem that is becoming particularly acute in light of today’s rising attrition rates.

2.     Customization

“In contrast to an open-market model, the contributions of the ecosystem participants tend to be customized to the ecosystem and made mutually compatible”.

Education requires a highly customizable approach – not just to different technologies and platforms, but also to different pedagogical methods and philosophies. Boundaries were already being pushed by EdTech, but the pandemic opened a whole set of new doors as new approaches are explored and old ones are being reassessed.

3.     Multilateralism

 “In contrast to open-market models, ecosystems consist of a set of relationships that are not decomposable to an aggregation of bilateral interactions. This means that a successful contract between A and B (such as phone maker and app developer) can be undermined by the failure of the contract between A and C (phone maker and telecom provider).”

Education is a great example of multilateralism in an ecosystem. The core interaction between a learner and an instructor requires support from an institution to be successful. This requires a testing/assessment system to certify its success. Ultimately, application in the real world will measure the value of the skill acquired. Without interaction between these multiple participants, success cannot be ensured or evaluated.

4.     Coordination

The last of our criteria is coordination. Education is by definition a holistic ecosystem requiring the collaboration various partners. Systematic issues faced by education cannot be resolved by any one player. Solving these requires cooperation from educational institutions, faculty, administrators, instructional designers, teaching assistants and of course students themselves. Beyond this, further coordination is needed with suppliers, software developers and regulators.

A coordinated model is required to solve problems that are so complex and profound that no one player will have the ability to find and implement a solution. Various actors must come together in order to innovate, create market power and offer a fertile ground for the spread of innovation.

Interaction Fields are best suited for industries that have high modularity (i.e. separate components that can beneficially be put together) and a high need for coordination.

The learning process is formed by a series of disparate – yet often disjointed factors – that together need to form a holistic learning ecosystem. It involves interactions between multiple participants – from administrators to parents and of course students and instructors – that together make learning possible. The combination of these factors creates both the need and the opportunity for Interaction Fields to be formed.

II. What are the types of problems that Interaction Fields in Education could solve

Understanding

Many students in focus groups told us that they simply do not understand concepts the way their professor explains them. This fits with our research with instructors, who told us they consider this generation of students particularly challenging to teach. One professor described his current generation of students as “demanding and aggressive”; another talked about the need to “reinvent his game”.

All of this means that the need for better understanding runs even deeper than in previous generations. Students are likely to turn to explanations from their peers that they find more easily accessible. YouTube has become a de facto Interaction field not just in entertainment but also in education.

Engagement and focus

A recent study by Microsoft concluded that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – shrinking nearly 25% in just a few years. In Vivaldi’s own research, students reported time management – and beyond this, attention management – as a top pain point.

Social interactions are one of the factors that created the problem. They have the potential to create solutions. Interactions offer the possibility to reframe the old “no pain, no gain” mindset that our research found students like to challenge. Millennials and gen Z learners don’t see learning and fun as polar opposites.

The ‘Grit and Growth Mindset’ has become one of the most popular education concepts of our time. While the notion of challenge continues to be well understood and accepted, boredom is not.

According to an administrator that we interviewed from one of the largest college systems in the country, the holy grail is to make learning as engaging as social media or gaming. Interaction Fields have an opportunity to play a role here.

Real world application

The dichotomy between academic theory and real world practice is increasingly being challenged.  “Just in time” information is taking the place of “just in case”, and “once in a lifetime “ learning is being replaced with lifelong learning.

Interaction fields offer the opportunity to open up the learning process to many more than those who make education their profession. This includes real world experts and companies on the hunt for talent. Boundaries between academia and business or practical life could become more porous. Interaction Fields could create spaces for learning by doing, mentoring students while working, and always learning as one’s career grows.

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In Part II, Anne will share types of emerging Interaction Field models and what to expect going forward in Education. 

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First, Facebook has defined a white space opportunity or new territory into which it seeks to position itself. Isn’t that a classic and proven example of a good positioning strategy? A brand resides in consumers’ mind, and positioning is about identifying and defining a place that a brand can occupy in consumer’s mind and how it distinguishes it from competitors.

Positioning is hard, mostly because most positioning territories are crowded places with many competitors. Facebook identified an empty space, a future. And it did not do this in a hurry. I read that Marc Zuckerberg already thought of rebranding Facebook in 2014 and he waited his time to do it.

Second, it might be a brilliant strategy after all because it depositions competitors. Aren’t we tired of upgrading to the new iPhone, only to realize that the camera is only negligible better from the previous one, the screen promises too much and all we get is a phone that costs so much more than the previous version. Facebook is in the crosshair with Apple, and this time around in history, it is Apple that is left behind. Remember that’s the company that was always far ahead of everyone. Others also feel the itch. Microsoft, now the most valuable company in the world, just entered the metaverse race with 3D avatars and immerse meetings, says the news of today.

Third, it does not follow the mistakes of Google with Alphabet. Facebook instead follows a branded house strategy. When Google rebranded and created Alphabet, it built a masterbrand with no narrative and no story. The metaverse is a powerful story for Facebook in contrast. It has consumed the news cycle for many months now and it will for years to come. In my book on brand leadership with David A. Aaker, we described the power of the branded house strategy, already two decades ago.

Years after the rebranding of Google, it has not accomplished much. There is still no brand called Alphabet and it still faces the same tribulations with the SEC and the FTC concerning its antitrust challenges. On the stand and in court is not Alphabet but Google.

Fourth, the strategy helps Facebook to compartmentalize and isolate the toxic part of its business, namely Facebook. By creating a strong umbrella brand, Meta, it puts its focus and that of the media and the street on Meta which naturally will take the emphasis off Facebook. It will help its other major brands such as Whatsapp and Instagram.

Fifth, it diversifies its revenues and changes its business model, while it still grows massively. Did you know that Facebook recently reported revenues of $29 billion (for the quarter), up 35% from the previous year? Did you also know that $28.3 billion or 97.5% came from advertising? Facebook is smart to think of alternative sources of revenues and this is where the metaverse comes in. If you listened to the announcement of Facebook last week or read about it, you know that Facebook isn’t interest just in selling advertising in the metaverse. Instead, Meta is interested in enabling the metaverse, in developing products and services that help creators and developers make new experiences and digital items and that unlock a massively larger creative economy. Those are the words of Mark Zuckerberg.

If that is true, Meta will benefit enormously from the metaverse but not just from advertising or connecting people as it did with Facebook but also by developing the tools to this new world. Examples already exist, namely the Oculus devices. This is just another playbook from good strategy that is hundreds of years ago. If you remember during the Goldrush, it wasn’t the hundreds of thousands of fortune seekers that got rich, it was those who provided the tools, the shovels, buckets and Gold pans that made out well. It is also a strategy that works so well for Apple with the iPhone and Amazon. Amazon makes most of its profits in its Amazon Web Services division as it is well known where it offers cloud computing services to companies who wants to be on the internet.

Sixth, Facebook solves an important and unmet consumer need, a social strain of society today, that funnily Facebook itself helped create. Did we forget that social media has all its ills and harms? Multiple studies have shown a strong link between heavy social media use and various mental pathologies such as depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm and even suicidal thoughts. Young consumers increasingly experience feelings of inadequacy about their lives or appearances.

In my recent book, The Interaction Field, I wrote about how companies need to build interaction field businesses. These are companies that bring together multiple platforms to solve major challenges and needs of consumers and society at large. Mark Zuckerberg says that the metaverse is not created by just one company. In the spirit of the interaction field model that I proposed, this means that it will have an open architecture of participants and partners that innovate, and collaborate and solve for the problems of consumers and society. In a way, Facebook is doing just that or so it promises.

So, what’s wrong with Facebook’s announcement? Is it possible we merely followed the social media pundits that love to hate Facebook?

It is true that Facebook has a lot of negative momentum. This happens when there seems to be nothing you can do right anymore. Here is my list of things that went wrong the week of Facebook’s big announcement:

• It probably was the worst timing for such an announcement. But is there really good timing for a rebranding when it is necessary?
• Love or hate him but Mark Zuckerberg just should be a more likable spokesperson for his company. He can’t help himself to appear pretentious. I liked his hoodie persona more than his attempt to be a bit more like Steve Jobs, see the look-alike sweater he wore.
• The context of his announcement also wasn’t helpful. He looks as if he already lives on a space station, it makes him look removed from reality.
• Where are his communications and PR staff? Where are all the talented people of Facebook. Where is Sheryl Sandberg?
• The speech wasn’t well written. Zuckerberg spoke mostly about his company, and his plans and Facebook. It is all about him, the billionaire that can, not because he should. While other billionaires explore space in reality, Mark Zuckerberg goes to the virtual space.
• The name. Calling your company Meta is already pretentious. Apart from that, there are many others who use this common name. They all scramble now.
• The entire circus around the announcement was classic PR overkill and overreach. It feels like the big elephant that can sit anywhere. And it appears it can. There seems to be nothing that can slow down Facebook or Meta, massive growth, massive profits, huge cash reservoir.

So, if you look at the social media feeds, opinions and commentaries, everyone talks about what went wrong. Perhaps we should take a second look at Meta?

If I were Mark Zuckerberg and hundreds of thousands of employees of Meta, I would worry far less about the news of the last week and much more about what is at stake really. In the end, a company or brand can only survive in the longrun, if it builds trust, and gains the trust from consumers and other stakeholders.

This is the real challenge, Meta faces. Stephen Covey, the author has a good take on trust. He says that there are two components of trust. One is competence and the other is character. If you have the competence, people will forgive you for a lack of character. They still trust you with their attention or their business. That is, you might not like a brand or company, but as long as it delivers, you are okay with it.

The problem happens when you don’t have the competence, or you promise something that you can’t deliver. If you fail on competence, you lose the trust, and then what matters is your character, what I would call your brand. And this is the real problem for Facebook, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. It fails on character, so it now needs to deliver on its promises.

In short, there is nothing more wasteful than to communicate an empty promise.

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