Startups In Asia Lead Digital Transformation Charge

By Dilip Khandelwal, President of SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, Managing Director of SAP Labs India

At last year’s “Economic Times Asian Business Leader Conclave” executives from corporations and startups discussed “taking Asia to the globe." And this week, the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, announced the acquisition of one of India’s biggest startup success stories, the e-commerce company Flipkart. Other signs indicate Asia’s startup community is embracing digital disruption and emerging as a force to be reckoned with on the global innovation stage.

Research from PwC predicts that Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh could be three of the fastest growing larger economies in the world by 2050. These countries are also rising as startup hubs, along with China, and Singapore. A new crop of companies in the Asia-Pacific region is focusing on digital disruption.

Digital disruption is a function of technology and speed. The rapid pace of innovation is putting emphasis on the word NOW. In the past, companies have delivered products. Today’s customers want solutions. Here is where the change begins.

Mobile connectivity continues to grow, and the average of mobile connection is going faster as well. The young Asian economies with the high number of mobile devices are willing to try out newer ways of doing business. So, we can’t call it disruption, it is an evolution.

I recommend business leaders start re-imagining their B2B markets for the world now, and to try a different business model beyond their countries. Companies will continue to have multiple disruptions at an increased frequency from now on. Don’t wait for someone who disrupts you, your time is now for change!

Certainly, digital technology has changed the pace of business, and in the start-up era companies are more conscious than ever of their speed to market. Automation and ‘thinking machines’ with its Artificial Intelligence (AI) are replacing human tasks. But as it says, it is artificial, even when machines are becoming more intelligent. It can’t be compared to human brains. The human creativity will never get disrupted. It will remain, because it is how we human beings are shaping everything!

A stitch in time

Take, for example, the 500-year-old wristwatch industry. Hundreds of years without any major changes and then it is re-imagined almost overnight by a wave of new wearable technologies. Similar changes have impacted industries ranging from retail and hospitality to transportation and education.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence can enable new types of preventive and remote healthcare. They may also improve diagnoses and accelerate drug development. The examples are numerous, but there is a clear pattern: we must plan for a dynamic, rather than static future and make ‘no regrets’ moves that work with most scenarios — but we’ll need to make some ‘bets’ too.

Many tech startups in Asia are already on this path.

While we cannot know the exact path towards the future, every one of us can shape it and imagine the possibilities. We should welcome the digital disruption and embrace the upcoming new technologies as part of an open innovation approach.

In the coming years, we will see how innovation out of Asia is changing the world. Asian startups are accelerating the move of global corporations to the digital world — and creating new business opportunities, models and markets.