Magnus Jones, head of innovation at the large accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY), believes that the metaverse is led by the younger generation and cannot be built on the same principles of the corporate business model.
Jones spoke about exactly this topic in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph editor-in-chief Alex Cohen at the European Blockchain Convention (EBC) 2022.
The head of innovation at EY explained the company’s investment strategy and explained why a large part of it goes to younger generation companies and startups. According to Jones, many of these young companies have proven themselves with valuable products and sales in the millions.
He said that the younger generation is currently driving the industry forward. In addition, it was said of him:
“We are clearly focusing on understanding the younger generations and we have also seen that the younger generations are building several key elements of this area.”
In terms of innovation, Jones said the age-old enterprise business model will not succeed in the Metaverse. Companies and tech giants would have to think outside the box of the existing mindset.
“It is not necessarily easy to apply a traditional business model structure here.”
He then also talked about the hype around non-fungible tokens (NFT) and whether it is necessary for established brands to experiment with emerging technologies. Jones said established brands would not focus on building communities and would simply follow the trend. In a way, that backfired. He explained that:
“GAP, for example, the British clothing company, suddenly launched an NFT collection of gold sweaters out of the blue, but did not invest time in building a community. As far as I’ve seen on Twitter, people have been wondering if this isn’t a scam.”
Jones also said the younger generations would determine the trend in the metaverse and the older generations would have to watch and learn.
