Ford’s global product planning and strategy director, John Stanger, has told a conference on future urban mobility that the company is looking to other industries to learn how fast technological change impacts companies and to ensure that Ford is well-positioned for potentially disruptive change in the automotive sector.
Speaking at Frost & Sullivan’s Urban Mobility 3.0 event in London, Stanger said that the telecoms sector was one industry that had seen dramatic changes, with some companies thriving and others unable to adapt quickly enough to changing market needs and opportunities presented by rapidly emerging new technologies.
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Stanger noted that Nokia and Motorola have fared poorly, with Samsung becoming a success story in the personal connectivity space. “Who would have thought that Nokia and Motorola would be victims?” he said. “Samsung, however, understood that the barriers between the telephone industry and the smartphone industry were breaking down to the point where they had to do something dramatic. Samsung did something dramatic and partnered with Google on the Android system and the rest is history.”
“What we have to do [at Ford] is say, is this sort of [rapid and fundamental] change going to happen in our industry and if it is, how do we position ourselves to be a Samsung rather than a Motorola or Nokia?”
Stanger told delegates that the automotive industry’s traditional barriers and frontiers are moving. “We need to look at adjacent industries who are also facing these big changes and see what they can offer, what solutions they might have. Cross-industry partnerships and collaboration are becoming much more important in terms of understanding what fits the rapidly changing market dynamic and what the changing consumer wants.”
He also said that the auto industry value system and value chains in associated industries face potentially disruptive change that companies such as Ford need to analyse and understand.
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By GlobalData“We have to ask how we can continue to be relevant in the future, how we might need to change to be absolutely at the forefront of what the consumer wants and how the mobility space is evolving.”
