Today, I will not write about USD/TRY, Parity or interest rate as no further explanation is needed for Turkey’s current economic situation. So, today I am writing about the future.
Kicked off with a dispute between Taxi Drivers and UBER last month in Turkey has reminded us again of the reality of “disruptive innovation”. A company that owns neither vehicles nor drivers manages to become a competitor of the ones owning these two. The same goes for the Airbnb. They do not operate hotels yet they too managed to take a groundbreaking step in “disruptive innovation” with the accomodation they provide, a big rival of regular touristic facilities. But how and when this situation has first emerged?
“BecauseThe world is becoming more and more digitalized…” Yes, but this can’t be considered a standalone reason for the abovementioned phenomenon. The fact that thechnological companies now rank first among the most valuable companies of the world is the unstoppable change affecting our lives. If we reduce the industry 4.0 to a simple definition, “a system solely designed to meet customer satisfaction and integrating artificial intelligence and supply-demand balance”, we will notice that the importance of the “fabrication” within the value change will slowly diminish.
Even in the 1970s, the share of the production in the distribution of value-added was not very large however the preeminence of pre-production and post-production services have eventually became undisputable. Now, in 21th century, companies must attach more importance to services to the services I mentioned above, including the logistics of the product, right financing so it can be bought by the consumer or the retailer, right advertising policies, digital applications, whether the product has a universal design, or whether its R&D function is designed to “make it better”, if it has a chance in the global competition…
“We support the innovation without actually believing in it..”
Turkey can’t either see the truth or it chooses to ignore it for now. Sadly, Turkey is dominated by the “Do you want people to lose their jobs?”, leading to ineficient use of resources, inability to go beyond “nice job” in terms of applications-software-cloud technologies. People are holding conferences on entrepreneurship and innovation all the time, but all these effort remain fruitless because of doomed-to-collapse conventional companies’ influence over economic decisions. It’s hard to use the advantages of Industry 4.0 in an environment where equal competition does not exist. Maybe, we can ease up the pressure on the public sector if we determine our options based on this fact when financing the institutions.
It is envisaged that in 2027 the number of freelancers will surpass the number employees on payroll in the US. Given the fact that we know many businesses that we are supporting, providing with incentives or limitless funds today will cease to exist in a foreseeable future where AI will dominate the manufacturing industry, the number of workers on payroll will diminish slowly, and many professions will fade into history and be replaced by new ones, what should we do then? These are all very critical questions and providing an answer to each and every one of them is absolutely more important than keeping daily track of exchange rate movements.
