Editor's note:
The essential role of digital technology is to reconstruct the relationship between man and machine, but the digital transformation of industrial enterprises is easier said than done. The key to the integration of knowledge and action is to unify technical feasibility with economic feasibility. To this end, it is necessary to deeply understand the essential characteristics of modern industry and the laws of technological development. It is necessary to adhere to long-term principles and accelerate the evolution of industrial technology with digital technology. This issue explores the thoughts of An Xiaopeng, an expert of Alibaba Cloud Digital Economy Think Tank and vice president of Alibaba Research Institute, on digital transformation.
The full text is about 9750 words, and the recommended reading time is 25 minutes
What is the reason for the lack of consensus on digital issues today? What is information, data, knowledge, wisdom? What is informatization and digitalization? What is Big Data, Internet of Things, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Middle Office, Intelligent Manufacturing, Industrial Internet, Digital Transformation? What is the difference and connection between Industrial Internet, Industrial Internet, and Industrial Internet of Things? What is the difference between digital economy, information economy, knowledge economy and network economy? Is the metaverse a trend or a bubble? What is digital-real fusion?
Some people are excited about new concepts, some people are confused; Some people smell business opportunities, and some people continue to hype. The quarrel over a new concept is not over, and it is drowned out by a new round of conceptual debate. It's an era of "new concept smog," and consensus about digitalization has become an expensive luxury. What we need to think about is, what is the reason behind this phenomenon? How can we find a common path to digitalization? On the road to consensus, there are four signposts: true problems, metacognition, second understanding, and the unity of knowledge and action.
What a problem
Practice is the only criterion for testing the truth, and the discussion of cognition, concepts and laws in the field of digitalization needs to be pulled into practice and iterative in solving real problems.
Cognitive pathways
There are two paths to people's perception of new concepts: starting from concept and starting from practice. For a long time, the digitalization of developed countries in Europe and the United States has been at the forefront, and today's embarrassing reality is that if you put aside the policy discourse system, the cognitive system of Chinese enterprises and academic communities on digitalization is based on the concept of imported products: from enterprise resource management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), manufacturing execution system (MES), product life cycle management (PLM) 40 years ago, to the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, CPS, Digital twins, a new generation of artificial intelligence, to Industry 4.0 10 years ago, the industrial Internet, digital transformation, and today's hyped metaverse. People are keen to analyze the English roots of the concept of imported products, tracing their roots all the way to ancient Greece, which is necessary, but far from enough.
We try to answer a basic question, aside from the political and policy discourse, which of the new concepts in the field of digitalization that people are discussing today is based on China's practice and exported overseas? Even if there is, it will be ridiculed, slandered and misunderstood by some experts. In fact, many experts do not agree that China has such capabilities and qualifications, even though some of China's practices have reached the forefront of the world. The usual process is that people will take a "foreign ruler" to find best practices in China, and then judge the quality and give conclusions about right or wrong, good or bad, advanced or backward. Many times, the advancedness, value orientation and important conclusions of the "foreign ruler" are important, but not absolute; Many new generation enterprises are mislabeled, saying that this is an MES company, a CRM company, we are accustomed to using the concept of decades ago to understand and apply to new technologies and new businesses, ignoring the transformation on the basis of the accumulation of technology and business quantity, has achieved qualitative transformation; Traditional knowledge and conceptual systems mislead people's understanding of new things, and old maps cannot find new continents.
The clouds and clouds of "new concepts" first filled the knowledge field and occupied the high ground of attention, and these digital concepts created by European and American technology companies and consulting firms armed the minds of Chinese, whether from a technical perspective, a business perspective, or an economic perspective, a policy perspective, or even a literary perspective. People study new concepts because they are worried about missing the next train, and they also see the popularity in the capital market and the quarrels and denigrations of scholars and experts, many people are full of confusion and confusion, and consensus has become a luxury.
Anchor for divergence
Many times, people's understanding and insight into technological trends and the trend of the times are based on the concept of imported products, starting from their respective knowledge backgrounds and experiences. How to pass through the "new concept haze" and discover the law and essence, people need to start from the concept, but also from the practice, from the problem, and take the real problem in practice as the anchor for understanding the new concept. Taking real issues as anchors is the only way to resolve differences on major issues and find consensus.
The road of digitalization has its universal laws, which are reflected in the value brought by the popularization and use of intelligent devices, software tools, mechanism models, and international standards, in the never-ending pursuit of cost, efficiency, quality, and service, and in the recognition of the continuous transformation of business strategies triggered by huge changes in demand. But it is certain that whether from the macro national perspective or the micro enterprise perspective, China's digital road is destined to be unique, this uniqueness comes from the superposition, aggregation and multiplication of China's advantages as the world's largest manufacturing country, Internet power, social consumer goods retail country, etc., from the unique economic system and operation mode, from the complexity, diversification, multi-appeal of the enterprise subject, from the multi-level market demand, from technological change and enterprise organization upgrading, strategic transformation, The interweaving and integration of business model reconstruction and business philosophy iteration comes from the high-frequency iteration of technology itself, and digitalization itself is a process of continuous exploration and there is no standard answer. We need to realize that digitalization must face two major issues: universal laws and unique models, and finding the real problem from practice should be the right posture to explore digitalization.
Change and change
For the current international and domestic concepts, theories, methods, programs, and models of digitalization, a basic attitude is to learn without superstition, understand without blindly following. Today, whenever there is a major disagreement in the industry on the new concept of digitalization, we need to return to the current China, to the scene of China's economic and social development, to the real problems facing China, and we must constantly think about what has changed and what has not changed.
In the face of the divergent digital trend, only to deeply embed new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions into China's latest business practices, to crowded shopping malls, roaring machine workshops, and earthy pastures, the digitization of American enterprises today does not necessarily mean the digital tomorrow of Chinese enterprises, only to fundamentally solve the cost, quality, experience, efficiency and other problems of enterprises, find solutions to cope with the era of huge changes in demand, and respond to the challenges of the supply system from scale to personalization, service, and intelligence. Only by reconstructing the product, R&D, production, logistics and supply chain system and business model, and building new competitiveness of enterprises, can we understand the value of the new concept. The concept repeatedly emphasized in "Zhi Xing" is to deal with the relationship between the necessity of technology and economic feasibility, and the new concept needs to be put into this scenario to systematically think about its connotation, extension, essence and value.
Metacognition
Never before in history has any technology like digital technology can emerge so many new technologies that have a far-reaching and extensive impact on human beings in such a short time, and the group, sustainable and explosive breakthrough and application of technology make people not anxious to think about the essence and underlying logic of technology, industry and economic and social transformation, which is an important factor that objectively causes the "new concept haze". What is the subjective reason for the lack of consensus?
Theory is a tool for saving information
Jumping out of phenomena and mining the essence of things is the basis for forming consensus, and insight into the nature and laws of digitalization is a sharp weapon to cross the "new concept haze". This requires people to construct a thinking about the underlying logic and epistemological methodology to help us understand the nature of digital transformation. The inspiration for me from this kind of thinking is that consensus needs to be based on an understanding of the nature of things, find the law from the phenomenon to the general, and see the big and the small to the small. On the road of understanding the nature and laws of digitalization, in the face of endless and complex digital concepts, concepts, views, models and cases, we need to reflect and re-recognize the cognitive system and methodology, and need the perspective and methodology of "meta-knowledge". "Zhi Xing" often redefines some of what we think of as "common sense", efficiency, quality, cost, innovation, etc.
Metacognition was proposed by American psychologist J.H. Flavel, which refers to "cognition of cognition", which is the deliberate and conscious awareness and control of cognitive activities. Cognition is people's judgment, understanding, choice, memory of the external world, metacognition is an individual like a bystander to their own cognitive world rational, conscious, independent "cognition", people's understanding of things, are from the understanding of the phenomenon, after understanding the phenomenon, must further grasp the essence of things. How do you think, what is the underlying logic of thinking, whether the way of thinking is right, what are the limitations of thinking, etc.
There is a well-known psychological effect of cognitive bias called the Duck effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Kruger and Dunning's research on people's skills such as reading, driving, playing chess, and playing tennis found that people with poor abilities often overestimate their skill level, they cannot correctly recognize the level of other people who really have this skill, and people with poor ability cannot recognize and face up to their own shortcomings and the extremes of their shortcomings. In other words, people often overestimate their knowledge and underestimate their ignorance.
Metacognition puts forward the idea that an individual has competence in a particular field has two meanings, one refers to the individual's outstanding performance in this field, and the other refers to the individual's ability level in this field, including self and others, which is a metacognitive ability. The Dunk effect says: When your ignorance is ignorance, you don't reflect, you don't reflect, you don't feel that you need to learn new knowledge and form new opinions.
Everyone is prejudiced
British psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason put forward a concept called Confirmation Bias (Confirmation Bias), saying that there are two mechanisms when people make judgments: first there is evidence and then conclusions are called "scientist mechanism", and first have conclusions and then find evidence is "lawyer mechanism". Confirmation bias is a lawyer mechanism: if you have begun to believe a point, then you will actively seek out evidence to enhance that information, even regardless of the facts. When we start to have confirmation biases, the area of the brain responsible for logical reasoning is turned off, while the area responsible for feelings is activated. With confirmation bias, any new evidence is likely to be overlooked.
Social psychology believes that there are three biases: one is unsubstantiated speculation, which makes one's own preferences, tendencies or opinions in advance without empirical evidence, investigation, and sufficient arguments. The second is to exaggerate subjective views and make partial and comprehensive explanations through extremely thin experience or facts that are not representative enough. The third is selective acceptance. Even if we know that our views are too one-sided, we still selectively accept the interpretation that is favorable to us, and ignore and exclude those who oppose us, even those who oppose us. Many times, people seem to have different views, the essence is a difference in conceptual understanding, a difference in constraint cognition.
How to build metacognition
In the digital cognitive system, how to expand the radius of cognition and how to construct metacognition? There are three core keywords.
self-examination
Being able to reflect on one's own knowledge is based on introspection, an open mind, because intellectuals often forget that they are not God. Confucius said: "Do I know anything?" Ignorance also". Socrates said, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." It is often said that the unknown of the Internet is much greater than the known. In the face of the digital technology revolution, people's basic assumption about digital cognition is that my cognitive system is one-sided and limited. The development of digital technology has brought people from different professional backgrounds together on one platform to form a common understanding.
When the Internet spread rapidly more than 20 years ago, people often talked about 3C integration, that is, communication, computing, and consumption; It is about the integration of the three networks, that is, the integration of the radio grid, the communication network and the Internet. 10 years ago, with the emergence of the industrial Internet, people discussed the integration of IT and OT, and how to integrate the enterprise external network (Internet) and the internal network (Industrial Ethernet); Today, when it comes to digital transformation, it brings IT technology, industrial software, automation, Internet, cloud computing, business management, marketing and other different professional backgrounds to a table for the first time to discuss, people are looking forward to a larger scope and deeper integration of technology and industry, but these people who lack a common knowledge background, discourse system, business scenarios and purpose orientation get together for the first time to discuss a consensus topic, people's subconscious mentality is exclusion, contempt, It is inevitable that consensus becomes a luxury.
The first humility required on the road to consensus of digital cognition: I am just a barbarian with fragmented knowledge. Consensus begins with admitting that we know nothing, that no one has God's perspective, and that we remain in awe of this era and constantly reflect on whether we are in "ignorance". At the same time, consensus requires the awareness and ability to "talk with chickens and ducks". For experts working to build a digital knowledge community, expertise without humility is paranoid, and humility without expertise is pretentiousness.
Digitalization has armed consumers, they have more right to express, speak, participate, and choose, which is an era of rising consumer sovereignty, but the supply side is not fully prepared for this change. What you lack is not customers, but customer interactions.
Three views
People are always looking for and extracting memories that conform to their own views and assumptions, concealing or ignoring contradictory information, naturally resisting unfamiliar and disagreeable views, not interested in understanding what is behind them, and we are prone to support our preferred superstitious ideas, false correspondences and false connections. Everyone has a cocoon of information, which has nothing to do with academic qualifications, positions, or experience. How to break through the bottleneck of cognition, metacognition needs to have three views: historical view, global view and global view.
The view of history is to lengthen the time scale of the understanding of new affairs, and to find the essence of things from the depth of history. As far into the past as you can see, you can see as far into the future, and forward-looking judgment comes from the law of long-term cycles. Over the past 60 years, the underlying logic followed by the evolution of technology from mainframes, minicomputers, microcomputers, cloud computing, data middle offices, smart phones, and smart cars is software and hardware decoupling, capability multiplexing, and the synergy of economies of scale and scope economy.
Global view is to broaden the spatial scale of the cognition of new things and find the coordinate system of global cognition. Germans' Industry 4.0, Americans talk about the industrial Internet, and the deep integration of industrialization and industrialization of Chinese is essentially one thing: crossing the trap of integrated applications. 10 years ago, these countries put forward their own digital development strategies, and today it is time to evaluate and reflect, and a common conclusion is that on the road of digitalization, whether it is enterprises and countries, everyone is still "crossing the river by feeling the stones".
The global view is to raise the vision of the cognition of new things and build the penetrating power of essential cognition. Any new concept is born under the current specific technical and background conditions and solves the problems of the year, but any new technology and conceptual system must keep pace with the times. In 2020, Wumart replaced its ERP with a multi-point system, and domestic ERP manufacturers have upgraded their ERP core product mentality and redefined their product concepts and value orientation based on cloud platforms.
method
Hegel once said, "Knowing is not knowing." People's understanding of things begins with the understanding of phenomena, and after understanding phenomena, further grasp the essence of things, and cannot only stay at the familiarity of things on the surface. Critical thinking occurs when we realize that we should reflect on what we know and what we know, and when we think about the mind itself. Behind the familiar is the direct lead to the passivation, inhibition, coagulation and closure of people's receptors, because "cooking" is repeated and monotonous experience that blocks life's reception and response to rich and fresh information from the outside world. People need to constantly reflect on their own conceptual beliefs, mental models and character habits, and it is easy for people to think of the end of their cognition as the end of the world.
Metacognition requires scientific methodology, and the most important value that digital technology brings to the world is to connect isolated units into a complex bio-like system. Equipment, production lines, factories, suppliers, vendors, products, and customers in the digital age are based on ubiquitous perception and connection, and the physical world becomes an organic organism. Many people use mechanistic methods to understand the world, the body has entered the digital age, the head is still in the industrial age, the physical world in the digital age is not everything completely subject to the mechanical causal law, following an uninterrupted chain of cause and effect, the world is not a simple addition of various sub-elements.
Any new conceptual system must be placed in the coordinate system of the large system to find its corresponding position, and people need to abandon either/or linear thinking and move towards complex system thinking. For the cognition of digital technology, it is necessary to abandon the "five senses and fight for merit", always argue which role is greater than the eyes, nose, and ears, and sometimes people always highlight the significance of one technology by devaluing the value of another; Today, 5G, Internet of Things, industrial software, artificial intelligence, digital twins, cloud computing, edge computing, time-sensitive networks, etc. constitute a "nuclear fusion" of intelligent technology clusters, and only collaboration can play a greater role.
In the digital age, uncertainty is the norm, and coping with uncertainty is the logical starting point for digital transformation. The difference between the assumptions of this logical starting point is the origin of the formation of people's cognitive differences, and the achievements of modern science continue to strengthen people's cognition based on the laws of deterministic logic, and most of the practical problems must be solved by deterministic science. The absolute, simplistic thinking framework of modern science can no longer tolerate uncertainty, and people who adhere to the traditional thinking framework are worried about the unpredictability caused by uncertainty, always hoping to find a panacea once and for all.
Carl Wake, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Michigan, did an experiment: six bees and six flies were each put into a glass bottle, and then the bottle was laid flat with the bottom facing the window. As a result of observation, bees keep trying to find an exit on the bottom of the bottle until they run out or starve to death; The fly will escape through the bottleneck at the other end in less than two minutes. The revelation of the "bee effect" is that experience and rules are important, but to keep up with the times, "creativity stifles when all people follow experience and rules". As we face a more uncertain world, it is especially important to judge the applicability of experience and rules. The re-understanding of uncertainty is an important contribution of modern science to human thought. Digitalization has brought human beings into a complex giant system of deep perception, extensive connection, and ubiquitous intelligence, and the worldview of human understanding needs to gradually evolve from "mechanical, predictable, and static" to "constantly evolving, unpredictable, and eternally developing".
We need to constantly rethink the methodology of understanding the world: the real world is moving towards a systematic and complex ecology, and our cognition is still a fragmented cognitive system, and this cognitive inertia comes from the education system and professional division of labor experience in the industrial age. In the complex giant system driven by digitalization, the emergence is the basic driving force for the evolution of digital systems, new technologies in the practice of application of innovation to accelerate the iteration of new concepts, understanding and understanding any new concept requires dynamic thinking, the understanding of any new concept should be dynamic, not static.
Multi-perspective observation is the basic requirement of cognitive methodology in the digital age, and any new concept can be observed from different perspectives such as technology, business, management, industry, and governance. As Dr. Zhaohui often said, innovation is not an invention, and any innovation must be observed from the unified perspective of technical feasibility and economic feasibility. Many times, people's disputes over views come from confusing the order and relationship of factual judgments, logical judgments and value judgments, and when people have arguments, it is easier to form a consensus on fact judgments, followed by logical judgments, and finally value judgments, and the realization is that people often replace fact judgments and logical judgments with value judgments. People also blur the relationship between "should" and "reality", which is what people have to face and should be the ideal that people pursue.
Finally, the principle of rational discussion of problems is to maintain sufficient vigilance against the "theory of motivation" and "theory of the mind", and the phenomenon often seen is that in the process of discussing new concepts and new views, people consciously or unintentionally are keen to criticize motivation and analyze the mentality, raise all unaccustomed words and deeds to a moral height and flog and condemn, and feel that justice is in the chest and truth is in hand. The motive is invisible and difficult to argue, and the intention is only "bold assumptions", there is no "careful verification", and the discussion has reached a dead end. "The law does not criticize the heart, but only words and deeds."
Seconds understand power
Wittgenstein believed that the boundaries of language are the boundaries of thought. When the threshold for understanding the concept of digitalization is so high, people need to reflect: can words express our thoughts? This raises two basic questions, one is about the new concept itself, does the connotation and extension of the new concept touch the understanding of the essence of things? The second is about the audience's acceptance of the new concept, does the new concept communication have the "second understanding"? Dr. Guo Zhaohui's "Zhi Xing" and its series of articles have aroused the resonance and discussion of many people, which reminds me of a book published by Tang Wen and others a few years ago, "Seconds Understand Power". I understand that second understanding is the ability to take any complex, obscure technical concept that the reader can accept at a very low cost of understanding. In the professional expression of digital ideas, Dr. Guo Zhaohui's thinking and expression are "second understanding", which can convey a highly professional and abstract technical system to the audience in a more popular way.
Looking back at the history of the creation and demise of new concepts in the digital field for decades, the new concepts innovated by international consulting companies and industry leaders are either short-lived or timeless, regardless of whether this concept is scientific, accurate and objective, regardless of the discussion of connotation and extension, its popularity is related to popular expression. On the road to a consensus on digital concepts, how to establish a second understanding? There are three perspectives:
Empathy
When you can accurately express the views you oppose, your differences have been reduced by 50%. When we oppose a point of view or concept, many times, we are opposed to a self-distortion, self-imagination, self-labeling, and self-righteous view expressed by others, and people blindly oppose it without understanding each other's point of view. Because empathy requires both an open mind and a high cost of substitution across mindsets, which everyone who aspires to progress should be wary of. Everyone has the inertia of thinking, this inertia comes from the system and framework behind thinking, people think that the logical system is always consistent and familiar, in fact, the mode of thinking is facing high replacement costs, people are disdainful, or unwilling, or unable to complete such transformation.
When we oppose a point of view, many times we don't know what we are opposing and whether what you are opposing is what the other party wants to express. In many cases, people's differences are not differences in views, but differences in basic concepts, basic assumptions, constraints, perspectives, and perceptions of value orientation. It is often seen that a group of experts argue about an issue or point of view, and it takes a long time for people to find out that they don't know exactly what they are arguing about.
In Lin Yifu's public debate on industrial policy a few years ago, Lin Yifu kept repeating that the "Lin Yifu" you opposed, I Lin Yifu also opposed, and Lin Yifu at the debate scene opposed the "Lin Yifu" defined by others. Lin Yifu constantly emphasizes that many of his views are imposed by others. In fact, this is not the exception, it is a normal way for people to discuss differences. Today, with the rapid iteration of digital technology, people continue to give new concepts new connotations and new perspectives, and the basis for people to reach consensus is to be able to clearly and accurately express each other's views from each other's perspective.
Story thinking
An important way to effectively convey information, ideas, and insights is through stories. Stories are the most primitive and effective way of disseminating ideas from ancient times to the present, and religion, advertising, art works, education, etc. are all through story thinking to achieve the dissemination of knowledge, concepts, and ideas. Dr. Guo Zhaohui is a master of entering stories, and he tells us a lot of stories in the book, and these stories build a second understanding to achieve the circle-breaking dissemination of digital concept cognition. Story thinking has four elements, characters, plot, scene, and meaning, and a person presents an event with conflicting tension in a particular scene and transmits ideas and perspectives from these events.
Inspiration is greater than consensus
Another perspective to reduce the cost of understanding is whether the ideas and ideas people communicate are inspiring and resonant. New concepts try to describe new phenomena, understand new laws, and gain insight into new trends. The purpose of researching, studying, discussing and even arguing about new concepts is to remove the false and preserve the truth, to approximate the truth, and to guide practice. Cognition is a process of infinitely approaching the truth, consensus is constantly formed in the test of practice, and the basic process of cognition is new phenomena - new concepts - new theories - re-practice - new phenomena... Only in the countless closed-loop iterations of practice and theory can the truth be found.
In this sense, for new concepts and new insights, there is no need for people to pursue 100% recognition and consensus, the ultimate purpose of consensus is to guide practice, and cognition with consensus can guide practice, and controversial inspiration can also guide practice. For me, the purpose of discussion and exchange is to form consensus, but more importantly, it is to inspire, whether there is a deeper, more comprehensive, and more systematic thinking about the work they are doing, and to optimize people's decision-making and behavior accordingly.
School education embodies the greatest consensus on cognition in human society for thousands of years, and the essence of education is awakening, is inspiration, people often say, "education is a tree shaking a tree, a cloud pushing a cloud, a soul awakening another soul." "In the field of digital full of uncertainty, on the road of exploring laws and pursuing consensus, inspiration is more important than consensus, inspiration is the signpost to a new round of consensus, and there is no shortage of correct nonsense in this world."
Knowledge and action
"Philosophers just explain the world in different ways, the problem is to change the world." Transforming the world is the fundamental mark that distinguishes Marxist philosophy from all old philosophies.
Thinking creates the world
The last sentence of the last chapter of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is the conclusion of the entire book: "Fast or slow, it is not vested interests that really have a good or bad impact on a society, but trends of thought or ideas." The relationship between theory and practice is an important proposition in philosophy and a practical issue. Knowing refers to inner awareness, the understanding of things, and the regular and systematic presentation of the physical world in the world of human consciousness; Acting refers to the actual behavior of people, from knowing before doing, knowing easy to do and difficult to knowing and doing, which is the proposition of epistemology and practice theory in ancient Chinese philosophy.
In the face of the beautiful blueprint of digitalization, practitioners are always unable to move an inch, and practitioners often cannot move forward in a straight line in the direction of theory. In the face of these problems and challenges, what kind of philosophy, attitude and method should we adhere to? Practice without correct theoretical guidance is called recklessness, and theory without practical testing is utopian. In today's digital context, how to understand knowledge and action, many times action is more important than knowledge. Easier said than done, we so-called experts are a group of people who stand and talk without backache, while entrepreneurs are people who gamble their lives with their lives on the future.
The American philosopher Dewey put forward a more radical view of knowledge and practice: to judge whether a theory is true is whether it is useful. Ideas and thoughts are tools to guide behavior, just as chopsticks and spoons are tools for eating, and whether a thought and theory is true depends on whether it can guide human practice and obtain practical results. People are entangled in various new concepts of digitalization, essentially trying to gain insight into the laws of this era and guide people's practical behavior. Dr. Guo's practice-oriented and problem-oriented way of thinking is something I appreciate. Whether it is CPS, digital twin, human-machine relationship, innovation system, etc. proposed by the industry today, he has his own set of thinking, and this way of thinking that combines theory and practice is reflected in three aspects.
One is iterative thinking. An important point of Dr. Guo Zhaohui is that to achieve the unity of knowledge and action, we must take a gradual path, which means that enterprises need to start from practical problems and shortcomings according to their own conditions, and respect the laws of technological development. In my opinion, another expression of evolution is: Think big, Start small, Scale fast, which is the basic model of business iteration in the digital age.
The second is engineering thinking. The feasibility of the concept lies in the feasibility of the project, which is the topic that Dr. Chaohui repeatedly thinks about in the book. The book talks a lot about innovation and how to reduce the risk of innovation methodologically. Open innovation, such as open innovation, through collaboration or acquisition; Minimum Viable Product, how the project is implemented, using simulation methods, prototype methods, etc. In short, it is necessary to reduce the risk of research and development.
The third is market thinking. Digital technology considers two aspects at the same time: technical feasibility and economic feasibility. "Quick response" is an important bridge between the two: changing the human-machine relationship and promoting rapid response through digital technology. Through the improvement of rapid response ability, it can create value for enterprises. Managers of enterprises should regard technological innovation as the venture capital behavior of enterprises, and need to learn to manage innovation in the process.
epilogue
Under the wave of digital economy, digital technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, and Internet of Things services, provide basic elements for the transformation of enterprise business models and organizational forms. In the future, with the further development of digital technology and the further popularization of 5G and other communication methods, more and more consumer-facing product and service enterprises will transform to platform business models, and realize their own platform transformation through digital transformation in order to deliver the brightest answers in the digital economy.