The Spider Web Strategy: Collaboration is the new innovation by OBWONI NAFTAL

Author:OBWONI, NAFTAL [OBWONI, NAFTAL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Five

Transforming the route to market strategy

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." – John F. Kennedy,

From solitary to social: how are businesses evolving

Spiders are solitary animals; however, they have turned sub-social, learned to tolerate each other, at least for a time, even if they do not exactly enjoy hanging out in groups to survive. Spiders were so confident of their eight legs, eight eyes, and two venomous fangs; the average spider is well-equipped to hunt and feed in solitary. But this is changing, from solitary to cooperation, from the dependency of own strengths to collaborative strengths, from smaller prey to giant preys; and this is the concept of a spider adapting to the new way of survival.

The global economic system is also characterized by a growing level of integrated services, like financial, retail, manufacturing, and nonetheless distribution, which in turn is mainly out of the need to work together. Trade blocs and Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) have emerged over the years and many countries have discovered the secrets behind numbers that have necessitated regional trading blocs and continental trade agreements that enable different countries to exploit their potential and gain new markets for their goods and services. In a global economy, no nation is self-sufficient, each one is involved at different levels in trade, selling what it produces, acquiring what it lacks, and also competing with trading partners. This new shift trickles down to every type and size of business that, by building a web, can acquire products or gain entry into markets that are not traditionally within their segment.

Charles Darwin once described spiders as “bloodthirsty and solitary”. But a group of scientists has discovered new habits of spiders that are now known to work together to survive. They have discovered skillful predators of spiders that were previously known to prey on fellow spiders but have now changed survival strategies into maintaining a truce and no longer getting into costly confrontations with their neighbors. This, according to one researcher, is after they discovered that “one night's food is not worth risking death”. This transformation is also more visible on social webs, where spiders have transformed themselves from building small webs into building larger webs to increase their chances of capturing larger prey.

Traditional businesses strategized on how they can cannibalize competitors and kill them through guerilla tactics. What such businesses never realized is the harm they are causing themselves by losing focus, the cost of the ‘war’ in both finances and time wasted in the confrontations, and the fatigue it causes to employees. Cannibal spiders discovered this cost of cannibalism and the effect on their survival and decided to change their social life by forging alliances and finding new ways to hunt in the harsh environments they were living in. By doing that, more time is spent on strategic implementations and accelerated business development decisions. Such approaches have also been observed by Jason G. Goldman in a BBC earth story published in 2016 that said that “some

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