What CEO wants to see the company’s share price tumble, announce massive
layoffs and be forced to issue a profits warning because one of its cash cows is suddenly looking lame? That is what happened to the telephone company KPN’s CEO, Eelco Blok, in April 2011.
Blok, who had just been appointed chief executive, was immediately faced with the havoc being played out in his industry by startups that created a way for people to send text messages over the Internet. Three years later Facebook paid $19 billion for one of those upstarts, WhatsApp — more than the market cap of KPN. Welcome to the new order, where the smartest people at the top are constantly being blindsided by seismic shifts in their sectors.
The impact is ongoing and all encompassing, and no media outlet is effectively helping companies across all industries to understand the waves of change and their impact. That is why Groupe Les Echos is launching The Innovator, its first English-language international publication. The aim is to produce world-class print and online content that fills that gap by explaining technology shifts and giving actionable business information to C-Suite executives. The Innovator will endeavor to inform its readers about the startups fromaround the world that should be on their radar before it’s too late, and tell them what they should know in order to prepare. What will make us different from other tech and business publications is deep knowledge of the global tech sector and an ability to explain tech trends to a general business audience. The Innovator recognizes that technology alone is not enough. To truly prepare for digital disruption, every company will have to reinvent itself and the way it is managed. So, the publication will also endeavor to provide insights about change management across industries.
We will offer daily updates on our website, produce a weekly newsletter to put tech news in context and print six print magazines a year, each with bonus distribution at an international technology conference. Mathieu Fritsch, The Innovator’s publisher, and I look forward to your feedback.
