Clients never tell us their business wants to be an also-ran. Everyone wants to dominate their market and is searching for the competitive advantage that helps them do it. The drive for leadership is why growth, year after year, is the top business priority — it’s a surrogate for leadership or at least the path to it.

The question is, “how do you create market-dominating growth over the long term?” The answer, come to find out, is straightforward: Develop new value delivery models, exploit emerging technology to create these, and deliver highly differentiated products, services, or solutions. In other words, to lead and grow, you have to do things differently.

Most firms, however, incrementally trudge up the digital innovation curve of yesterday’s business models and technologies. The result is that customer experiences are not differentiated — everyone uses the same approaches, the same technologies, and gets the same results. The best, we find, are practicing the disciplines of technology-driven innovation, which I discuss in this webinar as a preview to my upcoming report, “Dare To Disrupt With Technology-Driven Innovation.”

WEBINAR: How To Be More Disruptive: A First Look At Technology-Driven Innovation Practices

 

Key Takeaways From The Report:

  • Technology-driven innovation creates market-dominating differentiation and growth. Technology-driven innovation flips the innovation equation on its head. It puts rapid technology experimentation at the forefront of your efforts, not last, after the current customer and business needs are understood. It lets your firm ride waves of technology-fueled disruption to change the game and create a lasting competitive advantage, which translates to long-term growth.
  • Technology-driven innovators grow 4x faster than their peers. Our research indicates that technology-driven innovation leaders grow at 3 to 4 times a faster pace than their industry average. It is a massive opportunity for those that can get it right. The rest? They will try to follow you incrementally and ultimately lose that race.
  • Technology-driven innovation will turn business on its head. This is because, as firms catch on, change will accelerate, and only firms that proactively adapt will be able to excel. CIOs at leading firms will become second in line to CEOs, but they may be titled something different and have very different, shape-shifting organizations working for them. What’s more, we think CMOs and chief sales officers will be replaced by chief growth officers as firms transform and disrupt expensive and inefficient processes that generate revenue.

The research on technology-driven innovation is fresh, and the soon-to-be-released report, “Dare To Disrupt With Technology-Driven Innovation,” will be released on May 13 in conjunction with our Digital Transformation & Innovation 2019 Forum in Chicago. We will go much deeper there, first at an innovation summit on Monday, then we will help clients take the steps needed to succeed.

I expect some clients will say, “We are doing that already.” I suspect that many are doing a few parts right, but few are doing it really well. Others will recoil at the idea of technology for its own sake; I assure you that technology-driven innovation is not that, but explaining this concept is a more extended conversation.

I look forward to having that conversation with you at our event and hearing your feedback.