This is the first report in a series outlining companies that we think are lighting the path on the journey to the Coordination Age. Its goal is to deepen understanding of the Coordination Age and to inspire innovation and engagement in this crucial transition.
What is the Coordination Age?
The Coordination Age is STL Partners’ term for the new economic and technological era that the world is transitioning to. In the Coordination Age, the over-arching need of governments, companies and individuals is to make better use of the available resources to “make the world run better”. This means managing those resources to deliver better outcomes, better experiences, and less waste.
Connected technologies, including 5G, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, automation, Cloud and Edge Computing, are key tools to the efficient use, management and distribution of those resources. Resources include time, money, carbon, goods, water, land, buildings, raw materials, energy, and so on.
Why Coordination?
Managing resources better requires multiple partners to coordinate their actions and processes to deliver outcomes for maximum efficiency and effect. There does not need to be an all powerful, central ‘coordinator’. That is often neither desirable nor possible. Instead, there will be a multitude of interconnected processes and players that achieve coordination on demand to deliver the outcomes needed within the ecosystem overall.
Coordination, transformation and technology
Much of the action of coordination will be automated – processes or parties communicating with another automatically for the sake of speed, cost and efficiency, but the whole system will be under the control of people and organisations as it is now.
The Coordination Age is the master key to the puzzle of digital transformation. While the technologies have implied what is possible, the Coordination Age shows what it is for and why transformation is necessary, and what it will take to make it work in practice in real world ecosystems – the how.
Role of this report
This is the first report in a series outlining companies that we think are lighting the path on the journey to the Coordination Age. Its goal is to deepen understanding of the Coordination Age and to inspire innovation and engagement in this crucial transition.
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The Coordination Age 100: Inspiration for change
We aim to profile 100 companies across a number of industries as inspiration for new business models, how to transform a business to succeed in the Coordination Age; and/or as potential partners for the telecom industry. The Coordination Age is well underway and many companies have been built around driving this step change in our economy, or are transforming themselves to adapt to it. Some telcos have already started on the Coordination Age path as we have looked at this in Are telcos smart enough to make money work?, The roles of 5G & private networks and Can telcos create a compelling smart home?. However, for companies not already on this path, it’s hard to know where to start and what emerging technologies, business models and ecosystems driving that are Coordination Age.
What is a Coordination Age company?
- A Coordination Age company delivers better use of resources to their customers by combining different technology resources such as connectivity (IoT, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi, etc.), cloud/edge computing, AI and machine learning, and automation
- It operates in a B2B2X environment, bringing together previously siloed data, processes, companies, and customers
- A Coordination Age company usually operates across physical and digital worlds, but in some cases the resources can be predominantly digital too (e.g. in financial services or entertainment)
Benefits: better use of / returns on resources
Table of content
- Executive summary
- Introduction – the Coordination Age and this report
- What is the “Coordination Age 100”?
- The Coordination Age 100: Inspiration for change
- What is a Coordination Age company?
- Coordination Age natives vs transformers
- Ten company profiles
- Coordination Age natives vs transformers
- Coordination Age natives
- Octopus Energy
- Ocado
- Booking.com
- Babylon Health
- Starling Bank
- Upstart
- Coordination Age transformers
- Hitachi Rail
- Rolls Royce
- Orange Money/Orange Bank
- Signify
- Coordination Age natives