Good interview on the future of enterprise software with SAP's Americas CEO Bill McDemmott at Knowledge at Wharton. I found several points related to small business globalization and innovation quite interesting.
1. The view that businesses of all sizes are rapidly globalizing. Key quote:
"Any customer, whether small, mid-size or large, is thinking beyond their geographic boundaries, beyond their current markets. They have to innovate."
2. The role of global and cross border small businesses innovation:
"...some of the best business practices that we have now for small and mid-size customers actually came from our Asia Pacific operation... And then we brought those ideas and syndicated them in places like the U.S. where you could better serve the small and mid-sized customer over here.
So, innovation is fascinating, because it comes from every part of the world. The big idea is [that] the best ideas exist somewhere in the world at all times. The art form is aggregating them and scaling them across the world at all times."
Traditionally small businesses were somewhat protected from potential competitors and disruptive innovation by geography. But today's highly networked world is in many ways border less. Innovation and good ideas can come from anywhere. So can new opportunities and competitive threats.
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