Everyone and their mother can start a blog

How digitisation is making established business models obsolete – and what’s annoying about it. Essay by Simone Janson

Vaccines based on sugar, quality assurance through surface analysis, manufacturing of lasers, research on more effective solar cells, or optoelectronic components: new ideas have a hard time in Germany. Potential customers, sponsors, and established organisations are united in their scepticism. This is particularly striking in digital communication, which, incidentally, enables an idea’s success in the first place.

Sometimes there is method in madness: one of Germany’s most important companies, Deutsche Bahn, is going on start-up safaris in Berlin but customers still don’t have access to a real-time timetable. A person wanting to register a patent at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, the administrative office for innovation, so to speak, can only do this by mail or fax. These documents are later digitised.

The reasons for any form of scepticism lie in the danger for old-established companies. Look at newspapers: their traditional business model was based on a quasi-monopoly at the local level. The news rooms had complete information superiority. Their readers depended on their reporting. Unsurprisingly, journalists developed a matching air of confidence. It’s even less surprising that a young student visiting my talk on social media at her university was appalled at what I had to say: ‘So now everyone and their mother can start a blog?’

Meanwhile, the tide has turned: first, the classified advertising market moved online. A few years later and browsers now combine real estate search with augmented reality.

Even in more conservative fields like finance or human resources, countless start-ups have apps in store that aim at transforming digital payment or recruiting. As a relevant HR website, not a day goes by without articles on this issue crowding our desks. In recruiting, a big player like Google for Jobs is stepping up to revolutionise the market for job advertisements.

So, what about the dinosaurs? They regard themselves as indispensable because only people can assess other people. According to a University of Bamberg study among 1,000 companies, only four percent of human resources staff are afraid of losing their jobs to automatisation. When in fact, there has long been a whole host of algorithms for applicant selection – from e-recruiting systems with applicant data management, to automatic psychological assessment of social media profiles, or fully automatic employment selection based on speech diagnostics. Granted, the latter is probably in the realm of esoterics, not science.

If nothing else, such dubious ideas are at least partially responsible for stirring up scepticism towards any kind of innovation in many industries. Faced with a bulk of information and ideas, it has become very hard to filter out the good ones. Increasingly, it has become more about attention and clicks than quality content. In online marketing, the aggressive discussion of influencers is synonymous with this issue. Since everybody out there and their proverbial mothers can put in their two cents now, it is increasingly hard for start-ups to stand out of the crowd.

Even if it’s annoying, there’s only one thing to do: knowing the right channels for your product and consistently trying to get attention.

Simone Janson runs Best of HR – Berufebilder.de, an imprint for HR-related books and on demand e-learning.