#22 - Mark Esposito, Co-Founder at Nexus Frontier Tech - The secret to creating a position of business advantage

The focus of this week's podcast is business strategy, and my guest is Mark Esposito, Professor of Business and Economics at Harvard University & Co-Founder at Nexus Frontier Tech. Mark Esposito is a professor of Business and Economics, teaching at Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and serving as an Institutes Council co-leader at the Microeconomics of Competitiveness program at Harvard Business School. He also holds professorships at Hult International Business School and IE Business School in Madrid.

In 2016, he was appointed as Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Initiative at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. Esposito was appointed a fellow of the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai in 2017 and as a global expert for the World Economic Forum.

Mark was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award in 2017 because of his work around the DRIVE framework, which he co-created together with Terence Tse, whom I interviewed in one of my earlier podcasts.

I personally met Mark at the Future of Business forum in Paris, where we both spoke, and I have read their book myself in the meantime.

The framework it provides inspired me, hence I invited Mark to my podcast. During our interview, we explore the DRIVE framework and, in particular, how it helps organizations of all sizes to reveal the critical insights to shape their future proactively and find new unexploited markets.

Here are some of his quotes:

“DRIVE is a framework of what we call the future trajectories, things that we think will happen for a fact that will have an impact on major socio‑economic systems. Rather than thinking about the future as being this futuristic scenario far away from us, we try to determine what the future will look like, which gave the title to the book, by understanding the present. ..it's merely to understand how to position themselves in the next few years. For me, more than a competitive advantage is a position in advantage. They are proactively creating the future they want to have.

…as much as you benchmark, most disruption doesn't happen from your own industry. It happens from outside of your own field of vision DRIVE is a way to engage you with multiple factors. Some of them might be what we call no market factors, factors that are not currently in your business model.”

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. What questions to raise in order to constantly and optimally position my company for advantage?
2. Why it’s key to develop a strategic insight capability in-house rather than rely on external consultants
3. And why you’ll create more value by making your products compatible and combinable