VIDEO – Evolution of the Digital World Post Pandemic

Tacis, Regional Director, shares his expert knowledge of the evolution of the digital world post pandemic and how there is opportunity for SMEs and scale-ups to grow with the right strategies and skills in place.

Video transcript

Hello I’m Tacis Gavoyannis with Boardroom Advisors we do quite a bit of work with scale ups and SMEs and I just thought I’ll share some thoughts and statistics from some of the work we’re doing.

Coronavirus has changed the terrain were all still under lockdown we’re not quite sure when we’re gonna be left out again to pick up where we left and we’re not even sure what shape that’s gonna be.

One thing is for certain though coronavirus has forced the Digital Agenda right forward without any argument whatsoever. And for a lot of our SMEs and scale ups they are grappling with some of the questions about what’s going to happen forward.

Now many of you are probably in the digital space so if you’re operating in platforms if you’re in telemedicine e-education we’re gonna see huge growth in those areas.

And I think 2021 will be the year of the collaborating platform so a lot of companies will get together and innovate together, share together, try and figure out their supply chains where we’ve seen quite a bit of weakness.

And also there’s gonna be a huge change in the skills because people now realize they can work from home, they can work from anywhere on the planet in fact and contribute and I think collaboration platforms will see a huge growth.

The same as telecommunications that suspects are not very well because I’ve been there in the last 40 years especially in mobile comms. We’re gonna see huge growth in the broadband and telephony spaces themselves.

I just wanted to share some statistics with you because regularly we look at all of this and think we get a little bit down and depressed because we think everything’s changed we’re never gonna grow, things we’re doomed but I’d like to share with you some of the numbers. Bear with me because I need to check my notes here.

In 1980 the value or the GDP for the planet, for the whole planet, was estimated at 16 trillion US dollars. That in 2000 had already grown to 34 trillion with a lot of the new technology that was coming in: computers and the early internet but by 2007 it had grown to 62 trillion and then obviously we had the crash we were going backwards and it picked up again in 2018 we had 86 trillion dollars worth of GDP on the planet.

Now it’s 2020 forecast, which I don’t think will be true now, is 88 trillion dollars and it’s 2025 forecast is a hundred and twelve trillion dollars so if we look, I don’t know where we’ll end up in 2020, but for sure there is growth from where we are right now to 2025 there will be some challenges as well.

So the customers post-crisis… how have they changed… what are their new needs and how’s their world been impacted?  The digital skills I have mentioned, so people with specific skills will probably be able to trade across the planet and work for just about anybody they like because they can contribute to outputs remotely.

And we’re gonna have some challenges in terms of how do you repair something you can’t touch? I think robotics will come in to play quite strongly. But a lot of work around supply chains… how do we introduce resilience that coronavirus showed us was not always there.

But the message I wanted to leave you with is there is growth, there is opportunity that will come out of this with obviously a reshaping world around us but there is growth and we can help quite a few of the SMEs and the scale ups in terms of the next steps they want to take, the strategy they need to introduce, the skills they need to look at so help is not too far away so please feel free to reach out and talk to us thank you.

Written by: John Courtney

John is highly ranked in the Top 100 UK Entrepreneurs list by City AM and is winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from techSPARK. He has been a Board Director himself for over 40 years and first started placing Non-Executive Directors over 25 years ago. John founded and ran seven of his own businesses including a Management Consultancy for 10 years, a Corporate Finance offering for 10 years and a mid-sized Digital Agency for another 10 years.