In March 2022 I recorded a talk for the West Midlands trade.gov programme, with slides carrying the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games branding. The brief was exporting, and my angle was technology: how apps and online portals let a business that sells in one country start selling in many. I wanted people to finish it with an “aha” moment, one concrete thing they could do to move the needle for their own business.
The talk comes in two parts. The first makes the case that the opportunity is real. The second is about what to do with it.
Part one: the opportunity
Apps and portals, in plain English. An app is a piece of software you install, on a phone, a tablet or a computer. A portal is a website you log into that does something: it has functions, not just pages. Software as a service is usually a portal behind a paywall. The two can share one database, so an app and a portal can feed each other. Between them, they let you automate processes, improve the customer’s experience and reach people you couldn’t reach before.
Consumers and businesses have both moved online. I showed app downloads climbing every year since the smartphone arrived, the forecast growth in internet-connected devices, and in-app spending doubling between 2015 and 2017. On the business side, UK survey data showed that in 2010 most businesses used no hosted or cloud services at all; by 2017 almost none said that. Global spending on enterprise software was still rising into 2022.
Every one of those trends cuts both ways. If people expect an app for everything and your competitor has one, their reach is your risk.
The UK is well placed to export tech. In 2019 the UK was the fifth-largest exporter of digital services in the world, behind India, the US, China and Germany, and digital tech exports were forecast to keep growing to 2025. I also walked through a ranking of global tech opportunities by country, with fast risers such as Brazil, China and Singapore. My reading was that the UK sitting near the top matters as much as any single overseas market: a business can prove its model at home, where the demand for tech already exists, and then take it abroad.
Tech-enabled businesses are worth more. Businesses are often valued as a multiple of their profit, and the data I showed put tech businesses at about 1.4 times the multiple of comparable non-tech ones. To make that concrete: if a non-tech business making £100,000 profit is worth £1 million, a tech-enabled one making the same profit would be worth £1.4 million. Globally focused businesses tend to command higher multiples too, so the two effects compound.
Part two: how to innovate
Knowing the opportunity exists is the easy bit. You then have to innovate, prioritise what you find, and execute.
Most innovation is incremental. People picture radical breakthroughs such as GPS. Far more value comes from small improvements, like each better sat nav that GPS made possible. I used the British cycling team’s approach of finding a few per cent here and there, which added up to a winning performance. The same stacking works in a business if you build a culture of looking for it.
There are ten places to look. Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation (Doblin is now part of Deloitte) splits a business into ten areas you can innovate in, from how you make money and who you partner with, through your structure, processes, value proposition and ecosystem, to service, channel, brand and customer engagement. I pointed out that technology is often the glue between them. An app at the centre of your products can turn separate purchases into an ecosystem, the way Apple’s devices and services pull customers deeper in.
Check the hype cycle before you spend. Gartner’s hype cycle tracks how new technologies climb to a peak of inflated expectations, fall into a trough of disillusionment, and only later reach a plateau of productivity. Something five to ten years from that plateau might suit a large company buying a future position. For a start-up it can burn through every penny before the market is ready. Search for the hype cycle for your own sector before committing.
Start from four questions. Where can technology add value for your customers? Which of your business objectives could it serve? Which day-to-day pains could it fix? And what already works that technology could scale? That last one is where exporting comes in: we’ve done this for the UK market, so can technology let us do it globally?
Use your value proposition as a filter. Your value proposition is what customers get from you. It should decide which innovations you pursue, not just describe the result. Apple will never try to sell the cheapest phone, because that would contradict everything else it stands for. Work out the feature, the benefit it gives, and what that means to the customer overall, and drop any idea that doesn’t fit.
Prioritise with an impact–effort matrix. Plot each idea by how much impact it would have and how much effort it would take, then start with high impact and low effort. Do it twice: once to choose the innovation, and again to choose what goes into its first version. The smallest useful version, in customers’ hands early, teaches you more than a year of building on assumptions.
Where it went next
The talk covered the opening ideas of my book, Execute Your Tech Idea. When I recorded it, the book was still in editing; it came out later in 2022 and goes further into planning, building and launching a tech project. The practical side, turning an idea into a working app or portal, is what my company Scorchsoft does.
