WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: 8 best practice from the world of VCs and startups to help teams innovate.

WHY IT MATTERS: "digital transformation" often means anything and everything. These 5 markers can help you define quantifiable metrics to ground resources in concrete, actionable activities. Too often, unfortunately, are CDOs "chief digital officers" , CTO "chief technology officers" or "VP digital transformation" or "VP innovation" tasked with vague requirements that are aspirational ("move the organization in the digital world") or qualitative ("coordinate actions and support executives in the digital transformation"). After a few years of workshops, evaluations, and pilot projects they often fail to deliver meaningful business impacting metrics. 

WHY IT MATTERS: 

Question: who is the corporate leader for digital transformation?

Answer: covid-19!

These charts from McKinsey clearly show how much covid has accelerated digital transformation in organizations. Never waste a good crisis they say... ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: this article helps positions the strengths and weaknesses of lean and agile to highlight where each fits best in an organization.

WHY IT MATTERS: digital transformation often means innovation: different or new technologies, modified processes, new skills and expertise. To innovate - and thus to transform digitally - McKinsey suggests 8 elements to include in this article.

WHY IT MATTERS: innovation often is tightly related to digital transformation. This survey from planbox provides useful insights about the state of corporate innovation and also provides some useful tools such as the maturity levels highlighted here.

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting visualization to help categorize innovation projects.

WHY IT MATTERS: this framework highlights 12 key dimensions to investigate when innovating.

WHY IT MATTERS: great reference for getting out out the pandemic crisis... but not only that. Useful tools for any innovation scenarios.

WHY IT MATTERS: managing the innovation process can be done with post it notes and excel spreadsheets. For large teams, distributed teams or remote work teams, I guess a real tool is in order. This list should get you started. Happy to see a Montreal-based startup in the top position... Planbox ;-)

WHY IT MATTERS: innovation is being empowered by digital tools such as crowdsourcing and this report provides insights into how retails and brands are leveraging these tools - along with new processes and people change management required - to innovate on products and services.

WHY IT MATTERS: the most difficult part of digital transformation is the transformation part. This 90-day approach by HBR will help most team get over the initial "hump" and start their digital innovation process.

WHY IT MATTERS: it is a great summary of the key success criteria and pitfalls of innovation in large organizations. Must read for any startup or executive in large organization.

WHY IT MATTERS: everyone asks how they change do digital transformation. For one thing, setting up an independent lab can be a good place to start.

A discussion on the impact that technology innovation has had on the election of Trump and more disruption to come from Amazon. 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

The author presents compelling arguments about reasons why technology innovation has had such an impact and forces us to rethink most business models. Moreover the analysis of Trump's election as evidence that the power has shifted from editors and political parties to voters and end users is just brilliant and I will certainly use it in the future!

Explains 5 steps to build a house using open source components. Is this the future of home building?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Open source has revolutionized software development and other technology areas. Can it also be applied to real-life products? This is exactly what this is all about: revolutionize the way we think about our everyday products by having low cost options with no patents or protections. This should keep costs down and foster innovation. Watch out.

Rules that guide selection and priorization of projects in Google X, the innovation labs of Google that produced some of its most famous innovations.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Rules are different when you innovate and it is always useful to see which ones successful innovators break. Here it seems that the most important rule is acceptance of failure and very rapid decision making. Must read for anyone trying to innovate in his or her organization.

A great read for anyone interested in innovation within an organization. In particular, I found the 10000 things list reference to be quite unique and quite powerful.