3 Innovation Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption
By Marc Alba Otero, Senior Vice President, NTT, Inc., and Head of NTT Disruption
This is not the first time in history that innovation and technology have fundamentally changed the way we live and work. But it is the first time we’ve been exposed to change at this scale and speed.
The exponential ramp-up of available technologies we are experiencing today is not something the world has seen before. Previous industrial revolutions that transformed the world were rooted in one key technology. Today, you can mention at least 10 technologies that can change any business, any industry, any part of society.
In addition, the speed of transformation is astonishingly fast. In the past, change would take place over years, even decades. Today, entire industries can be disrupted in just a few months.
And it’s no longer only large corporations with vast resources that are at the center of change. We’ve configured a world that’s highly democratized, which means that today, anybody can change an industry.
Together, these three elements have created a perfect wave for the age of digital disruption. The question is: How should businesses respond?
Put The Problem Before The Technology
Innovation isn’t about the technology itself. It’s about new business models that leverage technology.
Can technology change the world? This is a good question to ask, especially when you look at the list of disruptive emerging technologies that are the foundation of the digital revolution.
But you could change many industries today with already mature technologies. Innovation is not about technology; it’s about finding a problem and creating an approach that changes the way the problem is solved today. Then, when you want to take that approach from concept to reality, you have many technology levers to do so. Five years ago, we had three to five technology levers to create solutions. Today, we have technologies that are already booming — such as social and mobile — as well as emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT).
This really opens the door to create any scenario you can imagine.
Three Strategies for Disruption
Innovation is only one part of the answer. For any company, in any industry, these three strategies are mandatory: Run your business. Change your business. Reinvent your business.
• Artificial intelligence/machine learning
• Virtual/augmented reality
• Robotics
• Blockchain
• Cybersecurity
• Crowdsourcing
• Digital biology
• Digital fabrication
• Internet of Everything (IoE)
• Quantified self
The fact that you need all three strategies running at the same time is often overlooked, because organizations tend to focus mostly on innovation. Even then, they’re applying what we call incremental innovation, creating a new or improved version of an existing product or service to change the business.
What they also need to consider is radical innovation, where you don’t start with a product that needs improving but a problem that needs solving — and then consider any number of far-out ideas to get to that solution and reinvent the business.
Radical innovation poses its own unique problem, though: its aim is to change a business which, by its very nature, is designed to fight the agents that want to change it. So in its attempts to be disruptive, the incumbent business may very well act as its own worst enemy.
Evidence from multiple industries and companies shows that this is the primary source of the failure of radical innovation. To address disruption effectively, companies need to decouple radical innovation from their core business:
1. Set up a team whose sole mission is to reinvent.
2. Give the team the authority to create a whole new way of doing business.
3. Isolate the team members from the basic operations of the company and your core business.
4. Let them start small and explore.
5. Once they’re big enough, they can either come back into the business or develop as a separate, radically different enterprise.
Today’s success is no guarantee of longevity. We’re facing a world in which change will be bigger and faster than ever before. There will be fewer limitations and more tools available. My advice for any organization is to play with each of these dimensions: run (do business), change (do better), and reinvent (do different). Unlearn to relearn. Don’t stop because you’ve found a way to do something better. Keep going until you find something unique.
Future Disrupted at NTT
We know that in tomorrow’s intelligent world, innovation that’s driven and enabled by technology will be crucial to every industry. This is why, over the next five years, NTT Group will invest an average of $3.6 billion a year in innovation initiatives.
We’re building a platform to address problems and apply a disruptive mindset to creating completely different solutions.
At NTT, we want to do things for real and for good — and help our clients do the same. Our open-innovation framework harnesses the collective effort of internal and external innovators and innovations, enabling us to partner with organizations globally to shape and achieve outcomes through intelligent technology solutions.
To learn more about how we view a Future Disrupted, visit hello.global.ntt.
3 Innovation Strategies for the Age of Digital Disruption
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