My Mistaken Business Mindset

In every business to keep yourself up ahead of the competition or at least to maintain your position in the market is have something that is own by you and only by yourself, what I mean is you have to have your own technology or you have your own secret recipe or you have your own skill that nobody have, the bottom line is to have something that is not dependent to other parties and it’s your own.

Actually there is nothing wrong with this thinking, in my mindset for the industry I worked in, I focus my self in developing our own technology platform, but it is until I start to reflect on automotive industry.

Let’s say Toyota, the automotive maker , in a Toyota car, you can say Toyota build the car, but does Toyota build iit 100%, who build the tires ? it’s not Toyota, maybe it’s Bridgestone, who built the air conditioner ? usually it’s Denso, who built the sparkplug ? NGK, who built the car seats, the windshields, the steering wheels, the dashboards ? the lamps ? it’s not Toyota, maybe Toyota design the car and manufacture the chassis and the engine block and that is it. So maybe in a car, Toyota only builts 20% and the rest 80% is built by other parties, so in a way, Toyota is mostly an assembling company.

The same thing with Apple, Apple made their product in China, so does Sonny, Samsung also does the same thing except Samsung produce the LCD and also the chipset.

So my point is you can actually built a product and maintain your brand even though you only contribute directly as much as 20%, these days I don’t think you can build a product without collaboration.

Seeing this I can imagine Toyota shared NGK their engine requirement so NGK can also produce the right sparkplug that support Toyota engine performance, so does with Denso, I’m sure Toyota shared the cabin volume size and the temperature requirement and how the AC flow should be, so it’s all about collaboration and sharing information and that includes sensitive information. Collaboration is the key and secrecy - Business Intellectual property- is a part we can not ignore.

So what lessons that I’ve learned : now I’m thinking collaboration at almost every steps of my business and of course we need to find our core competency, something that differentiate us in the market and able us to face the competition.

Collaboration enable us to :

1.       Shorten the product development time

2.       Cut development cost significantly

3.       Enable us to respond to market faster

4.       Focus our strength on what we do best

5.       Use other products/companies strength to enrich our own products

6.       Grows the industry

Summary

Collaboration and Core competency

-It’s ok to create a product by assembling various products, even though 80% of its component comes from other companies, it’s how you design, package, distribute, and maintain the quality that wins the market  -