English | EN D2D – Design To Disrupt: Uber, Airbnb, KLM, ABN AMRO at the VINT symposium 2014
Jun 23, 2014
Uber (2009) and Airbnb (2008)
With one mobile app, the Uber startup turned the transport market for persons and goods upside down in 130 cities worldwide. European Commissioner Neelie Kroes was incensed by the attitude of those wishing to protect the interests of the traditional taxi sector. In the Netherlands, Henk Kamp, Minster of Economic Affairs, is positive about the Uber initiative, which is spreading like an oil stain. Uber now has a market value worth that of Ahold and Air France combined. Airbnb is another high-profile example: 11 million overnight stays a month in more than 34,000 cities in 190 countries. This company deals with private people who wish to rent out a room, a house, or even a castle or a tipi for a shorter or longer time.
SMACT is the perfect formula for disruptive design
Transport and accommodation are the classic examples of today, but even the banks are under the spell of disruptive internet via Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Things: SMACT in short. Banking is indispensable, but you do not need banks for that, as Bill Gates once said. After Zopa, Moven is now also demonstrating this, through its mobile banking services. SMACT has brought all the basic ingredients together. SMACT – in the sense of ‘smacked’ – is a disruptive and serious threat to existing companies. SMACT is a reliable formula for disruptive design.
This is part 1 of 2 of our English report from our VINT Symposium Design to Disrupt, part 2 can be found here. We also published two dutch articles. Part 1 can be found here, part 2 can be found here.
KLM (1919) and ABN AMRO (1824)
Innovation is accelerating. We see it occurring all around us. Self-confident challengers are overtaking the old guard and leaving them behind in a cloud of dust. New players are attracting masses of people via the Internet of Things, the Cloud, mobile apps and another digital technology. The essential message is to copy success and fight back, but few companies are accustomed to quickly mobilizing such flexibility. KLM’s Social Media Hub and the Ideation & Innovation Centre of ABN AMRO are effective examples that deserve emulation.
D2D – Design to Disrupt
“Design to Disrupt” is the name of this game, or simply D2D. At the 2014 VINT symposium of the same name, Sogeti assisted organizations in formulating appropriate answers. What must I do to acquire a genuinely efficient mentality in today’s disruptive turbulence? How can I reinvent myself? What is my new design, my response to the future, to the issues I feel approaching? Remodel & Remake is what it is all about: often digital and physical at the same time. What are the appealing design principles to revitalize customer yearning?
An ever-shorter stock exchange listing period
It is not easy, because being predictable pays off. That is what shareholders expect. But “the single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.” These words come from business-guru Gary Hamel and it is a genuine truism: it is impossible to deny it. The recent VINT study of the success of companies in the AEX index shows exactly the same. Companies are stock-market listed for shorter and shorter periods of time and the trend is increasing. So you have to reinvent yourself.
How?
“Design to Disrupt” is imperative: think about it seriously and do it! So, shoulders to the wheel and get on with it – but how precisely do you do that? This million-dollar question was posed by VINT visionary Sander Duivestein, who also led the study on increasingly shorter stock-market listings. The relevant D2D ideas are presented in Part 2 of this twin article series, along with those of Gerd Leonhard, Arnout de Vries and Daan Roosegaarde. To begin, we shall provide answers to the ‘How question’, relating to market disrupters Uber and Airbnb, and to those of honorary fast-followers KLM and ABN AMRO.
D2D the Uber way (Niek van Leeuwen)
First, we line up the facts: the transport sector suffers from enormous over-capacity; the drivers working via Uber earn more money; Uber is cheaper than a taxi; Uber’s mission is to offer nice transport at a nice price in a setting that provides benefits to everyone who participates. In that way, it is not necessary to have your own car in the city, which contributes to better air quality and to a reduction of traffic jams and parking problems.
In San Francisco, where Uber started, there is now an Uber car waiting on every street corner. The low-cost Uber is called ‘UberX’ and is also referred to as the ‘Airbnb for the transport market’. This alternative is 30-50% cheaper than a taxi. Uber is now active in 130 other cities around the world.
In essence, Uber is a mobile app with a customer end and a driver end. Supply and demand are brought together in this way. The company only works with top-quality personnel from the profession and with top-quality material. Uber divers hold the door open for their customers, who are also offered a drink. The customer gives an assessment of the driver and the driver assesses the customer. For both parties, this promotes the most pleasant experience. In London hundreds of drivers are joining the project every month.
Besides Uberblack and UberX, there are also variants such as Uberlux and Uberfamily. The latter has children’s seats on board and offers a family discount. Uber invests little money in advertising and instead runs campaigns such as #UberIceCream, #UberSloep (consult Twitter), while Afrojack rode his own people in Uber to his concert in the Amsterdam Heineken Music Hall. In New York, a bicycle carrier service UberRUSH was launched: “a reliable ride for your deliveries”.
D2D the Airbnb way (Even Heggernes)
Via the successful Airbnb “peer-to-peer” actions, 200,000 overnight stays are organized every day. The founders in San Francisco needed money to pay the rent for their apartment. It seemed a good idea to offer people Bed & Breakfast, but they only had a couple of airbeds at their disposal. That was the origin of the name ‘Airbnb’.
At present, the company organizes overnight accommodation for 11 million guests in 190 countries every month. It is a typical SMACT and sharing story, and Airbnb currently has the greatest collection of interior photos in the world. The company is currently considering what it is going to do with this. The value of Airbnb is now estimated to be around 10 billion dollars.
D2D the ABN AMRO way (Menno van Leeuwen)
“D2D the Uber & Airbnb way” is a major challenge to existing, especially stock-listed organizations that are not accustomed to structurally embedding sudden strategic opportunities in business operations and customer interaction. Visionaries have seen the impact of SMACT as a disruptive design principle coming for a long time, and iconic startups such as Uber and Airbnb now provide convincing substantiation of this development.
The “sharing economy” is ongoing, but just at the moment the old guard is also recognizing this, it may be too late to join in. For this reason, ABN AMRO set up an Ideation & Innovation Centre in 2013, with the aim of assessing SMACT and sharing opportunities, implementing these, and familiarizing the entire organization with directive ‘finruption’ trends.
The Nederlandse Handelmaatschappij, founded in 1824, consolidated to become the Algemene Bank Nederland (ABN) in 1964, and eventually merged with the AMRO Bank in 1991. Under the leadership of Menno van Leeuwen, the innovation culture of the bank is now being shaped for the 21st century. Work is being executed in short sprints of 10-12 weeks. Bitcoin and peer-to-peer lending (Zopa among others) belong to the hot topics.
ABN AMRO acknowledges that the ‘Perfect Storm’ will not die down. This brings society and the economy, technology and human behavior together, so that business-as-usual is ready for complete renovation. Brett King is a good example in this context. With his company Moven, established in 2011, he brought the bank function to mobile devices without the intervention of the banks themselves. In 2012, Moven was elected Bank Technology News Innovator of the Year and Moven was given the Best in Show Award at Finovate 2013.
Other examples of disruption in the bank sector are Credit Agricole’s CA App Store on Internet, and Simple (“Bank to the Future”), which managed to attract enormous amounts of money and has now been taken over by the Spanish bank BBTA. The trend is evident: from traditional, central organizations to technologically distributed organizations. We see unbundeling everywhere, directed toward the individual who has become more powerful and influential than ever before, largely due to digital and mobile facilities (SMACT and sharing).
The fruits of the more radical innovation culture realized by ABN AMRO’s Ideation & Innovation Centre include a crowd-funding platform oriented toward sustainability; an App Building Centre oriented toward creativity; the FinHub to support one-man businesses with their administration; a digital Receipts Box to ease the burden on the accountant; and the InnoWallet to be able to pay bills immediately, without physical contact, at a distance of up to 50 meters, by means of Apple iBeacon technology. Payment can become an extraordinary experience in this way. In addition, the idea has been proposed to use ABN AMRO as a secure place to store Bitcoins, and much thought is being devoted to possible new opportunities when financial data can be shared throughout the European Union from 2017 onward. So, this is where the sharing economy is going!
D2D the KLM way (Gert-Wim ter Haar)
Hospitality and the provision of good service have been embedded in the DNA of KLM for 95 years. KLM has the aim to be ‘simply a humane company close to the people’. This is the formulation of Gert-Wim ter Haar, head of the Social Media Hub at KLM and, as such, a shining example in the world of aviation traffic and transport.
Work goes on day and night, in ten languages. Every week, 350,000 messages are placed in the social media, while a team of 140 people attempt to respond to every customer question within one hour. The KLM website and apps display, in real time, the number of minutes the customer can expect to wait until an answer can be provided.
Only 3500 was invested in realizing “Social Payment”, and that now yields the aviation company 75,000 euros a week. The Whats app application “Ask a Local Pilot”, which supplies up-to-date and extremely diverse items of specific information to travelers abroad, cost 70 mobile phones and the enthusiastic commitment of KLM staff all over the world. Got a good idea? Just do it! Issuing from the Social Media Hub, a refreshing startup breeze is now blowing through the whole of KLM.
It is important to communicate with people directly and on the same wavelength. The following customer interaction with Willem Nout is a good example of this (in Dutch slang):
Source: https://www.facebook.com/KLM/posts/10151850514115773
(Translation: KLM, mattie, I need you G! I want to fly to San Francisco on 14 May and would like to stop in New York to chill out there for three days or so. But how can I book that through the KLM bargain week offer fafiage? I don’t get how it works!
Fawaka Willem! Where is the one half of the twix mattie? Chilling in the Big Apple for a couple of days is super flex, sure. But you can only book a pure return with ‘world deal weeks’. So we advise you to book a world deal, for example …
My respect for KLM has just skyrocketed
Somebody at KLM is going to get fired, or a PR award.)
The iPads that the KLM crew have on board are also deployed to serve the customers better. The on-flight staff form an important link in the chain to complete the customer feedback loop. With Internet in the plane, interaction will become even more direct and intensive.
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