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Ericsson | A practitioners’ guide to accelerate 5G for business in 2020
Chapter 9: Initial use case focus
How burgers can beef up your 5G use case focus There will be no shortage of 5G use cases for a long time, but many industry players are struggling to decide where to start. How about turning to something familiar for inspiration? Here’s why your local hamburger joint can offer some food for thought. As discussed in a previous blog post, 5G is a learning-intensive market which requires extensive collaboration between businesses and service providers. The most important learnings are around use cases where 5G can make a difference in solving pressing business challenges. On this journey, businesses and service providers run into one or several of the following challenges: • 5G expanding into the business segment, and solving more complex business problems than cellular connectivity alone • Finding a common ground where business needs and solution capabilities align • Narrowing down to the most important use cases among a broad range of possibilities that come with 5G for a particular industry • 5G is a platform where the killer application is the breadth of use cases it can support – and more than one is often required to justify the initial investment. The nature of these challenges is similar to the ones people face when launching a restaurant franchise. First, it’s important to find a location, or designated use place, where you can open your restaurant. Before you can scale, you also need to nail the concept. Start by focusing on the key menu items you need to attract initial customers, and you have your minimum viable product. Once the concept has been validated, there are two ways you can scale your franchise. Firstly, you can add more locations, and secondly, you can add more items to the menu based on customer feedback across the franchise.
Interestingly enough, the process kickstarting an industry with 5G is similar to the hamburger restaurant analogy. Simply put, you need to: • Find a type of use place where you see the high revenue potential • Nail a few use cases that serve your target use places • Reuse and extend your offering to similar places once they’ve been validated • Scale further with new use cases once the network is in place. The initial nailing and scaling of use cases can be simplified if you can limit the amount of use cases required for success. I personally believe it can be done with three or fewer for any given use place.
Location, location, location
For anyone opening a restaurant franchise, it’s critical that the first restaurant becomes a success and easily replicable. The same applies to use places. Understanding the location where you wish to provide services is just as important as the use cases you plan to support. The number of possible use places you can consider will eventually be in double digits, and each use place and its specific characteristics will determine which use cases you need to support. Beyond the type of place, you need strong business partners who share your vision of unlocking business value with 5G in the first place. Ideally, you want them to join you on the journey to collaborate and co-create use cases that can be scaled down the road.
