Metaverse can’t be built on the corporate business model, says EY innovation lead

Jones believes the established firms need to focus on community engagement first before jumping on a trend like NFTs.

Magnus Jones, the innovation lead at big four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) believes that the metaverse would be led by the young generation and it cannot be built on the same principles of the corporate business model.

Jones’s comments came during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph managing editor Alex Cohen at the European Blockchain Convention (EBC) 2022.

The EY innovation lead shed light on the company’s investment strategy and why a significant chunk of it has gone towards younger generation firms and startups. He said that many of these young firms have proven themselves with valuable products and revenues of millions of dollars.

He said that the younger generation are currently driving the industry and explained:

“We clearly are focusing heavily on understanding sort of the younger generations and also down to the fact that younger generations are building several key elements of this landscape.”

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Talking about the innovation in the metaverse, Jones said that the age-old corporate business model won’t succeed in the metaverse and corporates and tech giants would have to think beyond the existing mindset.

“It’s not that easy necessarily to apply a traditional corporate mindset business model structure in this one.”

He went on to talk about the nonfungible token frenzy in the market and whether it’s necessary for established brands to experiment with such nascent tech. Jones said that established brands didn’t focus on community building and just jumped on the trend which sort of backfired. He explained:

“GAP, for example, the UK clothing company suddenly launched an NFT collection out of the blue by having some golden sweaters, while they hadn’t spent any time on building any community, as far as what I notice from Twitter, people were thinking, is this just a fraud?”

Jones said that younger generations would set the trend in the metaverse and older generations have to sit back and take note.