Trends: What do we look for?

Trends

• Trends: What do we look for?
• Technology Trend: Cloud Computing
• Industry Trend: Unbundling of banks – Lending Club
• Regulatory Trend: Deregulation – RBI granting banking licenses
• Industry Trend: Immediate everything – Payments
• Market Trend: Branchless Banking
• Market Trend: New Market Entrants
• Market Trend: Banks Extending Their Reach
• Industry Trend: Bank White-Label Services
• Industry Trend: Dual Strategies
• Societal Trend: Exploding Data
• Technology Trend: Banking API’s
• Market Trend: Digital Natives
• Market Trend: Mobile Adoption
• Technology Trend: Digital KYC
• Potential Technology Trend: Internet of Things
• Industry Trend: The Bank Finds You
• Potential Industry Trend: Mobile Wallets Replace Cards
• Industry Trend: Social & Mobile Payments
• Industry Trend: Virtual Currencies
• Industry Trend: Social Finance
• Technology Trend: Big Data
• Potential Industry Trend: Bank as Data Manager
• Technology Trend: WiFi Availability
• Technology Trend: Fast Cycle of Consumer Technology
• Technology Trend: Biometric Authentication
• Industry Trend: Social Servicing
• Industry Trend: Social Reputations
• Market Trend: Increased Substitution with Capital Markets
• Industry Trend: Aggregator / Comparison Sites

Trend spotting and trend watching are key activities in an environment scan, which is part of the strategy process.

But what trends should we be look for and how do we find them?

The Business Model Generation book provides a great graphic for forces and trends.

Trends are addressed at the top of the diagram. There are 4 categories of trends:

• Technology Trends
• Regulatory Trends
• Societal & Cultural Trends
• Socioeconomic Trends.

In my opinion, Socioeconomic trends are generally associated with the forces (industry, macro-economic, and market). As I track trends I will try to track them at the more fine-grained level.

Trends tell us about the rate of change of some attribute in the environment. To be useful, we need to think of a trend as a graph with time (t) on the x-axis, the trending attribute (a) on the y-axis, and the trend shown by the curve “a=f(t)” — even if we are guessing on the shape of the curve. Most of my trend posts are vague and require more work. I will try to be more specific about which attribute I mean. Instead of saying “There is a Cloud Computing trend”, I want to say “The price of Cloud Computing is trending down” or “the terabytes of public cloud data storage is trending up”, etc.

Any help with this would be much appreciated!

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