Technology
Creating the next huge business in today’s tech world takes more than a killer use case — it requires social scalability. This means building technologies that address and respond to society-level needs, dynamics, and contingencies, not only user-level ones. With today’s bets bigger and riskier than ever, we help the world’s leading technology companies make the right ones – by understanding the social systems their technology will be a part of.
Now, more than ever, we see companies under pressure to find the next big thing.
The focus has shifted away from one-off apps to platforms, from iterations on existing technologies to truly disruptive ones, from building in well-established swim lanes to breaking into adjacent (and not-so adjacent) sectors. In response, companies are putting enormous resources and energy into scalable, future-ready technologies.
And yet, despite all of this, we see fewer companies readying their technologies for the global social systems their solutions will need to fit into.
We believe that the next generation of companies will succeed by building technologies optimized for ‘social scale’ from the ground-up – tech that will be widely adopted, and meaningful to communities and society at large. At ReD Associates, we help companies build for ‘social scale’ by understanding the human and social phenomena behind their strategic challenges:
Building strategic perspectives on issues like, privacy, data collection, and automation;
Defining roadmaps for the rollout and adoption of end-state technologies;
Identifying potential unintended consequences of new technology launches;
Defining the core value and priority features for new platform and product development;
Identifying new core and adjacency growth opportunities;
Building internal ideologies and external growth stories anchored in human realities.
Many companies tackle these questions in limited ways, with off-the-shelf frameworks, rapid-fire design-thinking brainstorms, or searching for pain points in user journeys. But solving the toughest problems of social scale requires a more thoughtful approach – with bespoke methodologies, and deep consideration of the human fundamentals. At ReD, we carefully apply methods and learnings from a range of social science fields to define the human value of new technologies. Our multi-disciplinary teams bring both deep curiosity and rigorous analysis to human behavior, working together to study and solve new problems in fresh and helpful ways.
