Mobility is About People, Not Just Devices
Tencent's SY Lau shared his core beliefs about mobile innovation and entrepreneurship at the Viva Technology Paris
PARIS, July 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- SY Lau, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and President of Online Media Group (OMG), said at the Viva Technology Paris that innovation creates value for users; being innovative means staying ahead of others by a considerable margin. An integral part of Tencent's DNA, innovation has always been one of its essential corporate values. SY Lau was joined on a panel by two of the most successful and influential innovators, David Marcus, Vice President of Facebook's Messaging Products, and Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of the Publicis Groupe.
Dedicated to fostering open innovation and collaboration between large companies and startups. Viva Technology Paris is the largeset global tech event, bringing together more than 30,000 visitors, including 5,000 startups, hundreds of top leading investors and the most innovative global companies, to share their vision of tomorrow's innovations for economic development. Mr. Francois Hollande, President of the French Republic, and Mr. Emmanuel Macron, Minister of the Economy, Industry and the Digital Sector also attended the event.
Being a global entrepreneur, technology evangelist and digital economy opinion leader who has witnessed the incredible changes brought about by the rapid growth of the digital economy, SY Lau was invited to share stories and insights regarding his experience with the massive mobile innovation that has occurred in China, thus providing guidance to startups while explaining the methods by which established corporations can embrace an innovative mindset.
2015 CNNIC report shows that the average Chinese spends more than 26 hours a week online, that is an increase of 300% in a decade. Nearly 90% of Chinese netizens use mobile to access the internet, and check their mobile devices over 50 times a day, some as often as 10 times a minute.
In SY Lau's view, mobility in China will evolve around the development of smart cities, smart consumers and smart contents. The concept of smart cities will become a reality in more than hundreds of cities in China; lines between apps, media usage, e-commerce and social application are getting blurred, and customer-centric is evolving into customer-obsessive; smart content will take on a new breath of life, with mobile entertainment contents taking the lead for biggest growth.
"Knowing when and when not to apply technology is key to innovation. Innovation demands that we reflect upon the mobile products and services we are creating and judge them by whether or not they provide significant positive change to help connect people," SY emphasized.
SY Lau believes that innovation has to happen at the individual level, with the passion to make things different, a strong sense of curiosity, and a passionate desire to inspire. When more people share these same attributes, then the likelihood of innovation taking place in the community is greater.
"Whereas cooperation can be mutually beneficial, co-opetition reigns," he continued. "Successful entrepreneurs are those that are capable of channeling their values towards building an eco-system of cooperation alongside the rivalry of competition."
The "biggest competition" lies in who is able to provide better service to users and who is able to create better value for them. "Our future competitors would probably be those small startups, namely the quickly rising unicorns, rather than huge established enterprises," said SY lau.
SY Lau further elaborated that Tencent does only two things: Connector and Content. Tencent works to build an open platform in order to attract and empower more entrepreneurs to create their own content on Tencent. "This is why we focus so much of our resource and energy in the construction of open platform and mass innovation base to support startups."
In closing, SY Lau encouraged business leaders to foster a forward-looking culture that is customer-centric, and techno-driven, to not only cope with, but to embrace opportunities. In short: Always be over-prepared: outperform based on accumulation of experience.
As one of the world's top tech leaders, SY Lau was invited to the Elysee Palace by French President Francois Hollande.
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160701/385693
SOURCE Tencent
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