{"id":13904,"date":"2017-09-18T22:34:21","date_gmt":"2017-09-18T20:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=13904"},"modified":"2021-08-16T18:17:49","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T16:17:49","slug":"big-ideas-in-sofia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/big-ideas-in-sofia.html","title":{"rendered":"Profiting From The Digital Opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, I was invited to present the latest opportunities and challenges of Digital Transformation at the SAP Big Ideas executive evening event in beautiful Sofia, Bulgaria.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Rumyana Trencheva, Managing Director for\u00a0SAP South East Europe kicked off the event, and there was a short speech from the brand-new German Ambassador to Bulgaria, Herbert Salber (he had started his role just four hours earlier<\/a>, and this was his first official act!).<\/p>\n

David Rowan<\/a>, Editor-at-large for Wired Magazine UK then explained how to profit from the digital opportunity, with lots of real-world examples gathered from his interviews of technology pioneers around the world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

His big message was that digital change is real and happening faster than most of us realize. Exponential change \u2014 such as the dramatic falling cost of data storage, the price of solar electricity, the adoption of bitcoin, DNA sequencing and more \u2014 is threatening business models everywhere.<\/p>\n

Incumbents must take proactive action, investing in defensive \u201cmoats\u201d of data that give them a head-start on the trends of tomorrow.<\/p>\n

For example, Facebook acquired a startup called Onavo<\/a>. It’s an application that helps you keep track of your mobile data use. But as a result, it\u00a0also knows how apps are being used, and which apps are\u00a0trending \u2014 so if, say, a HouseParty app<\/a> starts taking off, Facebook\u00a0can be\u00a0quick to provide the functionality themselves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And Orbital Insight<\/a> is a satellite intelligence startup that (among other things) tracks the numbers of cars in 250,000 parking lots of 96 retailers<\/a>. They were able to sound alerts about possible problems at JC Penny long before the company announced bad results \u2014 and perhaps even knew about the problems before JC Penny itself!<\/p>\n

To succeed in the future, corporate culture is essential. Nokia started life as a tyre company, then evolved to sell paper, then electrical devices, then small electronics, and then quickly became the most popular phone company in the world.\u00a0But at that point complacency set in, and they were notoriously dismissive of the introduction of the first iPhone a decade ago.<\/p>\n

Over drinks, I discussed with David why some companies seem complacent in the face of so much change. He believed that it\u2019s partly because most people haven\u2019t had the opportunity to see the changes first hand: \u201cI think everybody should try to spend some time in China \u2014 when you see what\u2019s happening there, you\u2019ll be more eager for change!\u201d<\/p>\n

Companies need to invest in constant change, using ideation to\u00a0ask themselves the question \u201chow can we be the kind of company that eats ourselves?\u201d Appropriately-sized failures must be encouraged \u2014 and the lessons learned even\u00a0celebrated with champagne<\/a>!<\/p>\n

The big danger, according to David, is \u201cinnovation theatre\u201d \u2014 islands of innovation implemented as a thin veneer on the same old corporate organizations and processes. While each of these initiatives can provide some value, they can also slow down real innovation, by masking the need for more fundamental change.<\/p>\n

One way to combat this — and to succeed with real transformation, rather than just implementing technology — is to align your organization and your employees around a clear mission, to concentrate on “building something meaningful”.<\/p>\n

My presentation was on how SAP itself is “innovating with purpose”, with SAP Leonardo<\/a>, a new digital innovation system designed to help our customers such as Stara<\/a> innovate at scale and confidently redefine their business.<\/p>\n

Overall, it was a great event, and I look forward to going back!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Digital transformation in Sofia, Bulgaria<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[1303,196,384,390,618,911,1302,1249,998],"class_list":["post-13904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","tag-bigideas","tag-bulgaria","tag-digital-business","tag-digital-transformation","tag-innovation","tag-sap","tag-sap-labs","tag-sap-leonardo","tag-sofia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/how-to-profit-from-the-digital-opportunity.jpg?fit=609%2C553&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3Cg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20532,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13904\/revisions\/20532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}