With the global pandemic forcing many businesses to operate remotely, adoption of the latest secure technologies has taken on greater importance for many industries. While it presents great opportunities for providers of the said technologies, it also great challenges of meeting demand.
After interviewing eight global digital champions which included Amazon, VMWare, Slack, Alibaba and Baidu, the following three emerging approaches have been identified:
Innovation by experimentation: a continual process of developing ideas on a small scale without high upfront investment, and then leveraging and rapidly scaling up those that turn out to be successful.
Radical transformation through incremental approaches: breaking up large scale projects into strategic investments with measuring capability at each stage allows companies to radically innovate several projects at once in small steps. This method also mitigates the risk of a single large project failing and allows businesses to judge which projects will yield the highest returns or biggest impact on investment.
Dynamic sustainable advantages through portfolios of temporary advantages: due to the fast-paced nature of the digital economy, competitive advantages are often short-lived. Implementing a strategy for successive and incremental temporary advantages can yield significant long-term gains.
All three strategies use elements of diversification and portfolio management to mitigate costs of failure, as is often seen in investor portfolios.
Source: City University London