Retail is Open – Are You?
Fujitsu / November 26, 2021
Retailers are under constant pressure to evolve – and up until now, much of that change has been a solo effort, taking place behind closed doors.
Imagine how much quicker things would move if everyone worked together, using strategic relationships and cross-industry partnerships to solve problems and explore untapped opportunities? Co-creating, co-developing and co-innovating change.
As Richard Clarke, Executive Director, Global Retail at Fujitsu explains, the future of retail is collaborative – and it’s being driven by Open Retail innovation.
Sharing the responsibility for retail innovation
Retailers are currently being challenged on all sides. Declining store traffic. Diversifying social channels. Meeting demands for greater transparency and sustainability in products and practices. Making customer interactions consistent across every touchpoint, in every market, while still feeling localized. All this, and adjusting to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has accelerated ecommerce growth by ten years.
It’s almost impossible for any retailer to overcome each of these obstacles on their own. But rather than letting organizations get lost in a web of complexity, the retail industry has an opportunity to create change in a different way. To share the responsibility for innovation by adopting a new, collaborative approach, enabled by technology and an ecosystem of partnerships.
Welcome to a new era of Open Retail.
A co-creative approach to innovation will empower retailers to tackle consumer complexities together
What is Open Retail?
Although new to retail, the 'open' model has already been successfully applied to different business areas – from open management and open communications to open sustainability and open innovation.
Open Retail creates better consumer experiences while managing the efficiency, reliability and cost of retail operations, and increasing workforce value and productivity.
How? Through co-creative ecosystems and cross-industry knowledge sharing, enabled by technology and an ecosystem of partnerships.
Rather than focusing innovation on internal resources, Open Retail involves diverse stakeholders from inside and outside retail organizations – colleagues, suppliers, partners, prospects, communities, industry bodies; even competitors – taking practices from every business area to drive change through transformative technology.
