Virtual companies are the next step in the evolution of businesses. It is already happening in parts. What a company is, will change dramatically over the next couple of years!

Employment

We all know that the times when an employee stayed with a company for most of his life are over. In many places you also see, that “employment” in the traditional sense does not describe, how humans produce value for a company anymore. Everything from freelancers over time employees to crowdsourcing shows that the world is changing. Although many companies still rely on payroll employees, these people often already work remotely and only check into the office occasionally (if at all). In fact, the notion of an “office” as a place to do work is beginning to vanish.

People become more loosely attached to companies. And that is to the benefit of both sides. Workers are free to work wherever and whenever they’re most productive – they can even work for multiple companies at once. On the other side, companies are competing for experts and talented people – with the option of experts working for multiple companies, the competition becomes less fierce. Also a company can buy any expertise it needs, without having to create a job position and having hundreds of experts on its payroll all the time.

Clusters of Functions

Apart from employment, other structures in the company are changing, too. Parts of the supply chain might be departments within the company or close partners outside – the distinctio
n becomes less clear. This leads to “functions” clustering together as temporary virtual companies. These virtual companies assemble, fulfill their role and then break apart again, only to reassemble with other functions for the next project. Much like software and hardware services are modularized and assembled on demand, company functions will come together and split apart to suit the current purpose.

All these changes bring a lot of market opportunities with them!

Apart from preparing your own company for this next evolutionary step, one can offer products and services to aid other virtual companies.

Communication

Let’s start with the obvious for remote work. Communication for distributed teams is already very important. But the challenge remains to approach the yet unmatched productivity of a team working together in one place. Group chats like Slack ride this wave. Also video conferencing tools are needed everywhere. Dropbox tries to simplify document sharing. One important theme in all this is, that it has to be as simple and technology-agnostic as possible. You can’t force remote workers to all use the same browser version over your VPN after signing in with your corporate LDAP. So solutions have to be more flexible. Apart from the technical, you can’t force workers to all know the “XYZ process” or send them through tool trainings. So the tools and services will have to be simple and to the point. There is a huge market developing for these kinds of tools and established players are not always in the best position.

Telecommunication

The telecommunications market will also be impacted by this. People will strife for more independence. Traveling the beaches of South-East Asia while working for your company puts some demands for mobile data plans. Offering a service that is global and location-independent will win telecommunication providers some serious revenue.

Cities

Workers not being tied to a place or time will also ease the rush hour problems in most countries. Traffic will decrease or at the least distribute more evenly. This in turn creates new opportunities for cities to repurpose space taken up by big roads. And from that might sprout new opportunities for local businesses. Barcelona shows a way with its super blocks.

Governments

Taxing might take a little longer to adapt to these changes. Nevertheless, most governments target their taxing system at the old worker who has one employer or is a freelancer. As more and more people refuse to fit in that old image, governments will have to find new, sane and fair ways to tax people. Another market for consulting services and IT products.

 

There are a lot more impacts of the change from traditional to virtual companies. Please leave a comment, if you want to know more on the impact on a particular industry. Anyhow, the changing work and corporate world opens up countless new markets. So why not jump in and grab your piece of the cake?

Cheers!