BIIA Chairman David Worlock expressed his amazement in his recent blog: Post-modern B2B: Doing the Unthinkable that “the world in which I (Worlock) grew up in B2B is now over, and some weeks you live through a few days when everything you see and read hammers the message home. This has been one. I find huge encouragement in what I see the business and professional business markets doing – risking their lives to save their lives – yet I am still amazed, given the conservative resistance to change, that they are doing it at all.”
In his blog Worlock expresses his expectations of Post-Modern B2B:
- there would be a diminishing emphasis on content, its ownership and proprietary nature
- the asset would become the understanding of customer needs, and turning that into trust and authority by virtue of satisfying those needs with solutions that satisfied my mantra: productivity gain, decision-making enhancement, and compliance management
- the business model would change in line with this, and settle around service contracts and content rental
- users would stop being researchers and start being fully informed participants in workflow and process
- and in order to make this happen, those who had formerly fought to the death about content ownership would cross license content to each others’ solutions, co-market solutions around shared content, enter into lifetime rental arrangements with users and generally behave in an almost exactly opposite manner to the way they have generally behaved for the last 40 years
Nevertheless Worlock sees new movement and re-creation of the B2B markets playing out. He leaves open the question who is making it work and whether the new movements are making money. He ended his blog with a strong recommendation: “It is time to pack away the skepticism and embrace change – by living it.”
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