Success no longer comes down to market share. To succeed, as a business or a region, you must own a bigger share of the future.

Getting a grip on whatever’s coming next is not easy. But get it right and the rewards are huge.

The challenge was crystallised at this year’s Dubai Lynx Festival of Creativity when TBWA\Raad Digital Arts Network (DAN) partnered Hyper Island at the annual Digital LAB.

Hyper Island — dubbed the ‘Digital Harvard’ — uses digital technology to spur creative collaboration. They go to today’s cutting edge to cut you in on what tomorrow may bring.

The core focus of the DAN-Hyper Island collaboration was mobile technology. The Middle East is already home to the world’s second largest mobile phone population (526 million people). Last year, regional smartphone usage doubled to 112 million.

Yet just a couple of decades ago this technology set was limited to military walkie-talkie transceivers and carphones for the super-rich. Today, it’s a massive industry that has fundamentally changed lifestyles and behaviour.

Its impact on operational efficiencies within business, on consumer buying behaviour, product comparison and information-gathering and sharing is immense. Incredibly, some businesses have been slow to embrace mobile and attendant opportunities.

In future, tardiness like this could prove fatal. It’s not the big that eat the small; it’s the fast that eat the slow. This lesson will be brought home in the years to come.

The pace of change has picked up since cellular phones came in, and, for me, this was the key message from the DAN-Hyper Island workshops.

Mobility is today’s trend; rapidity is tomorrow’s.

Techno innovators

Big ideas move us forward, but the focus will increasingly fall on the ability of technology to accelerate the implementation of the big idea.

A new generation of innovators is developing new concepts at a rapid rate. Sticking to what we did in the past is no longer an option. Technology is pushing back the boundaries. To move into this new space we need to harness our imagination and set our creative impulses free by imagining possible futures as a springboard for ideation.

We can build a better tomorrow, but first we have to imagine it. New solutions, outcomes and products will flow from there.

New technology will enable breakthrough after breakthrough... perhaps to solve an immediate problem or perhaps the problems of the world.

Already, techno-innovators are developing a democratic ‘Maker Culture’ with the power to change industries (including ours). This is both a DIY and a do-it-together culture and it’s triggering creative collaboration on a scale never seen before.

Maker Culture collaborators use computer-controlled desktop tools that rapidly turn ideas into products.

Rapid Prototyping

The Dubai workshops gave us a glimpse of Rapid Prototyping techniques and their ability to quickly fabricate designs, models and physical parts.

Rapid Prototyping leads seamlessly to Rapid Manufacturing, with 3D printers laying down successive layers of liquid, powder or other materials to build a model from a series of cross-sections.

This is just one technology set with the power to change lives, create new industries and accelerate national and regional growth.

Businesses (and individuals) hoping to be part of the new dynamic have to understand and explore these new technologies.

Thirty years ago, geeks in a garage shaped a new digital future. In a few years, 3D printer innovators and like-minded new technology pioneers could lead a similar transformation.

New products, new solutions, new gadgets and new industries could be just around the corner. The Next Big Thing could emerge with bewildering rapidity (and with it our next big clients).

It took a while, but agencies have now started to talk ‘digital’. However, opening up the digital toolkit is just the beginning. Digital is just part of the new technology flood.

New waves of advanced technology will soon create new needs, products and brands. The effects on consumers, on our client-base and on how we run our business will be revolutionary.

We have to wise up to these developments and prepare for them — and we have to do it at pace.

Change is no longer constant, it’s getting faster. To take advantage, agencies have to be quick on the uptake.

This not only applies to the agency business. Our region faces the same challenge.

The opportunities may be boundless, but they are not beyond our grasp. To grab them we have to open our eyes and our hands.

— The writer is the chief operating officer at TBWA\Raad.