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Welcome to the big, bad, and massively entangled world of Automotive – aka the world of mobility, as we all are renaming it! But we’ll come to the emergent meaning of “mobility” a bit later.

First let’s try to understand the new operating mechanism of the creative supply chain for making a vehicle. The days are over of order taking or waiting for that blueprint from the OEM and then reacting to it with by bidding at the lowest possible cost in order to win. There’s no one stopping you, Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers, from short-circuiting the typical protocol, directly going to the end users, engaging them with proper design research methods, and extract their needs, wants, desires and dreams. Your strategy team should now be highly involved in “independently” seeking out those many future scenarios of user behaviors and expectations. Then, you should be leveraging your internal core engineers to come up with more “aligned” design innovations, based on that hard micro-evidence, and presenting these meaningful solutions to the OEM.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to work out each and every detail for final production design. Conceptual designs, either in storyboard formats or in rough mock-ups, will suffice too. Armed with these, the likelihood of your winning the bid greatly increases. Why? It’s simple. You present these concepts as “properties” in your tradeshows and create that much needed “pull” in the market, rather than throwing your money in the “push” ( commercials and advertisements ). You are then actually demonstrating your own innovation culture and flexing your strategic and design thinking muscles. More than that, you’ll also be potentially presenting not just to your customer’s purchasing team, but to their design studio too, and we all know the weight the design studio carries when it wants something!

OEMs are good people too! They love to see independent research studies by other companies, especially when these affirm their own research studies. This further builds their confidence in your design decision pyramid. There is a tremendous advantage to building this alternative, independent vantage point. Apart from that the OEM also gets to see your company’s alignment with their own beliefs, mission and brand vision. It also helps them ascertain your way of work, your way of critical thinking, and your way of “walking the talk”. They can see and actually feel the “collaborative” aspect of a potential relationship with you, and you both know how important that aspect is.

Maybe we should now unpack the word “mobility” and what it means for us as the emergent future unfolds. We all have to make peace with the fact that it’s a brand new “organism” in the making. It’s not, by any means, completely formed and set. We all – yes, including you, Tier 1’s and 2’s – are trying to shape it. The onus is on the entire B2B chain to connect to their domains and seek out those probable, preferable, and possible models of the future. It’s up to that same chain to come back to the OEM’s and reason with them about what that ideal future state will and should look like. None of us can decipher this alone or even try to define its scope. In the mobility world of the future, Ford or Hyundai won’t be OEMs any more than Uber or Amazon or LocalMotors or Canoo or McDonalds or Starbucks or Elon Musk or Ma, because the word OEM itself will have complexly different meaning. The decisions will not be made by any small select group of people. Rather, they’ll be molded by the collective wisdom of humanity. In a way, this has always been the case of course, but the lag was too long before. Now more than ever, this translation is becoming hyper-fast and will change the entire chain of influencers and decision makers.

Together we will attempt to uncover these emergent decision-making structures and our placement in that B2B chain.