Inspiration.
It can slam into your from multiple directions at the same time. Or maybe it's just a couple of coincidences.
Case in point. Last Friday I was in a meeting with the CEO of the Danish Design Center, Christian Bason. We were planning the upcoming Tech Mahindra-hosted event in Copenhagen on April 24th '23, where Christian will be keynoting and I'll be moderating. He is also the co-Author of Expand: Stretching the future by design. And now the pressure's on me to come up with a Design angle for my own speech and intro.
Simultaneously, something's been bugging me of late. A nagging feeling that the convergence of Generative AI's such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, Whisper and many others, are ripe for exploitation by one essential collection of organisations that power the global economy.
Namely, SMEs. AKA Small and Medium Enterprises. Let's not worry about definitions or size here. I'll leave that to the management gurus. Let's just say that they are proven viable businesses who are not of corporate scale, and you know them when you meet them. They design, develop, build, market, sell, distribute, partner, support and maintain products and services the world over.
One of the business challenges they face is pivoting, or adjusting course, at the same time as delivering on existing commitments. They often run at fine margins, have unique ownership structures, and have less room, or more specifically time and money, for maneuver.
Let's segway a bit. Startups. They're everywhere too. They come in all shapes and sizes. I know. I've been involved with them for going on eight years across the Nordics. They are also fuelled by an interesting phenomenon called the Accelerator. They also come in all shapes and sizes, but ones I've been most involved with have been City or Regional accelerators. Now these are valuable institutions and services that help spin-up new ideas, and, if wired into the local business and university ecosystem, can create rich opportunities for growth.
But what about SMEs? What if they had similar accelerators to help them leverage their existing proven businesses, and exploit Generative AIs.
Enter coincidence # 2.
So it's the Sunday morning after my meeting with the aforementioned DDC's Christian Bason. I'm wired-up from a triple espresso, and watching a YouTubevideo from the Tokenized AI channel on how to use a combination of ChatGPTand Midjourney to create a new Gin brand from scratch in a single afternoon. Check it out here.
Then, that thing that's been bugging me got crystalised. It's possible for SME's, with minimal time and cost outlays, to explore new business designs in a very short space of time. Thanks to the expressive and visual power of these GenAI's, you can rapidly iterate on ideas, drilling deeper, running ideas off stakeholders, and identifying potential risks quickly. And it's going to get even easier when ChatGPT is fully integrated with Excel and other tools.
Which brings us full circle back to City Accelerators. Cities and regions should start spinning up a new type of business accelerators for SME's, helping them to leverage rapidly evolving GenAI's. The economic effect will be far more dramatic than with startup accelerators.
So if you are the CEO of an SME, the opportunity to design future scenarios for the growth of your business is now closer, and cheaper than ever.
Now, if only I can go and design a good speech for that Copenhagen event...
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