The Design to Disrupt Executive Summit in 7 blogposts
Oct 14, 2014
Last week the VINT and Sogeti Labs team flew out to Munich to host our Executive Summit 2014 on Design to Disrupt. Together with some top speakers (coming from Microsoft, Forrester, Uber and Frog Design among others) we tried to make our clients aware of the disruptive potential of new technologies that is growing at a staggering speed.
We set out to find answers on these four questions:
- How to build organizational resilience when innovation is accelerating?
- What should you do to intelligently create your own disruptive innovations?
- What are the appealing design principles that organisations must apply?
- Is ‘client obsession’ something that can be engineered?
Our colleagues Jaap Bloem and Erik van Ommeren reported on the answers in a series of 7 blogposts.
Forrester Principle Analyst Ted Schadler colored the Customer Obsession part of the D2D program by sharing insights from his new book The Mobile Mind Shift. This shift corresponds to the expectation that people can get what they want in their immediate context and moments of need. Customers and employees are making this shift, now. It means that the battle for a customer’s attention will be waged in mobile moments — anytime that customer pulls out a mobile device.
Mobile is also about the billions of sensors and trillions of connections, new intelligent software and analytics that should lead to improved lives a. Hannu Kauppinen, head of research laboratories at Nokia Technologies, argues the programmable world promises to bring life to physical objects, opening new opportunities for engagement and interaction
Disruptive A.I. John Hogan, from IBM, came to explain the thinking behind Watson. Watson, the famous cognitive system from IBM is making great leaps in computing by analyzing large datasets and deriving intelligent answers from them.
Finally, Tim O’Brian from Microsoft gave the seven rules for the new IT.
Didier Bonnet from Capgemini Consulting was very clear about disruption and digital transformation: he has never seen a company successfully transform into a digital master without clear top-down vision and mandate. A pure bottom-up transformation does not exist! That said, adoption and engagement ARE key ingredients, just like governance and – of course – technology.
In this context, Joseph Pine puts forward The Law of Vitality: only the enterprise that attains vitality, through its incessant destructive recreation, produces the wealth necessary to survive! The enterprise must be “destructively recreating itself over and over again by innovating within the enterprise at least as much as is going on in its ecosystems. Anything less and the enterprise will eventually get blown over by others moving faster, operating better, and creating greater value.”
No event about disruptions, without actual disrupters. Jochen Burkhardt from IBM took the audience on a ‘tour of the future’. Anyone has probably seen the glam videos of futuristic looking homes that self-regulate themselves around the wants and needs of the home owner. Jochen showed what it looks like in real life, today, working in real time.
Mark Plakias from Orange Institute talked about their latest research into Unicorns, Startups and Giants. The report was triggered by observations of so called ‘unicorns’ such as Whatsapp, when it was bought by facebook for 19 billion dollars. How could such a small company of fifty people be worth that much money? What does this mean?
Uber is an example of such a disruptor. The taxi-type app grew out of San Francisco in 2009 to now over 200+ cities, with every week 7 to 10 new cities added. Thomas Oehl, from Uber Germany spoke about the growth, the ambition and the challenges for Uber.
Last but not least: design. Frog Design’s Patrick Kalaher’s shared his advice on designing for disruption based on some observations and how-to’s. Finally Dutch designer, entrepreneur, and innovator talked about how we can enforce innovation by connecting, by learning from one another. To do so, we have to pass through three thankless stages: that of ‘it’s impossible’, that of ‘it’s not allowed’ and that of ‘it already exists’. Innovation never comes just out of the blue, you always build on a basis of existing reality.
Our VINT research on Design to Disrupt will be available for download in december.