Are You Ready for the New Global Business Ecosystem?

Innovation and Digital Transformation are two of this year’s biggest and most loosely defined business topics. In practice, both refer to inter-related emergent disciplines that are pivotal for firms to learn, practice, and master. Together, they represent both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is to use digital to catalyze innovation and reimagine your present and the future. The threat is that your competitors, both known and emerging, can easily do the same. In fact, over the past decade, the combination of digital transformation and innovation has turned the global business ecosystem upside-down, giving birth to a new generation of business models and corporate giants, while diminishing and disrupting others.

Because the innovation tools and digital technology are readily accessible to everyone, technology itself affords no distinct advantage; rather, it is the human element behind that technology and innovation management–ideas, strategies, and ways of working–that business success depends on.

Innovation and Digital Transformation

Innovation and Digital Transformation Resources

Innovation

How We Deliver Value

Digitally transforming a company is a surprisingly human journey, and getting it right requires new mindsets and skills. We help firms understand what the benefits of digital technology, speed, innovation, and smart risk-taking mean for them. With the game plan figured out, our solutions build the critical leadership capabilities needed to create and advance an innovation culture at the individual, team, business unit, and enterprise level. These programs are fast-paced, hands-on designed experiences that bridge the gap from your current state to the desired future state. We combine a sequence of short, mini-lecture sessions, hands-on “table top” workshop exercises where learning and tools can be applied. Customized business simulations compress the months and years of high-risk innovation projects into a few hours.

Areas Where We Play

  • Establish an innovation culture and the innovation leadership required to be successful in the new business ecosystem
  • Uncover what digital transformation mean for the organization, BU, or function and how to stay ahead
  • Effectively build design thinking and smart risk-taking
  • Lead from the future, back: tools and techniques that leaders can use to spot trends, explore provocative futures, and connect the dots back to actions that can be taken today

Our approach to Innovation and Digital Transformation

For innovation and digital transformation to be made a part of a firm’s culture, openness to both disciplined experimentation and uncertainty is a must. Most of all, it requires a willingness to challenge the assumptions that may have made the company successful in the first place. And, in order to deliver meaningful and credible outcomes, an innovation and digital transformation initiative must be explicitly linked to a firm’s business strategy and goals. Our approach allows leaders to practice and internalize the shifts required to create a culture in which innovation and digital transformation can thrive.

We take a three-step process to innovation and digital transformation:

  1. Identify the problem to be solved: We partner with you to identify the business outcomes you want to achieve through innovation or digital transformation. Based on this, we recommend an approach that starts with ensuring you have a strong innovation culture in place.
  2. Build a culture and capabilities: We teach new ways of doing and leading innovation and digital transformation by using hands-on customized experiences and tools that can quickly be learned by individual contributors, teams, and senior leaders.
  3. Extend impact: To extend learning and embed capability over time, we offer a suite of “in-the-field” performance support tools, practice, and coaching services for program alumni. The end result is both a unique practice and support journey that helps leaders develop the muscle memory, confidence, and habits needed to develop and spread an innovation culture firm-wide.

What Makes Us Different?

Digital transformation initiatives often fail because they are treated as technology implementations for which success is measured by deployment metrics. In reality, the business needs to engage with a more holistic transformation and judged by the business value it creates; Leaders driving digital transformation must ensure that the people involved in the change are heard and engaged – factors that are often missed in typical deployment metrics; technology should be judged by adoption.

Innovation and digital transformation is both a process and a mindset. At its core is a way of discovering and solving problems; a process that starts with several uncommon notions. First, we start by linking innovation and design thinking to the firm’s strategic objectives. Second, we don’t begin process with product specifications or traditional marketing research; we start with exploration and empathy for the users for whom we are innovating.

This is different from traditional forms of solution development as it involves using the tools of exploration and observation to understand user’s unmet and, often, unexpressed needs and wants. Then, lots of different ideas are developed, refined, and tested quickly and cheaply with customers, partners, and collaborators. Underpinning all of this is leadership training on how to create a culture in which this innovation mindset can thrive over time.

Our Clients Love Working with Us.

 

We Work with Leaders at Every Level of an Organization

Innovation leaders need to have their feet in two places at once: scaling today’s business model while creating the environment in which their people can discover tomorrow’s business opportunities. This means to lead people successfully through moments of high uncertainty and ambiguity. It requires a different set of leadership behaviors.

BTS offers a compelling point-of-view on what these behaviors are – and what great leadership looks like in the pivotal moments that leaders face when leading their teams to innovate.

C-level: We work with top leaders on short ‘crash courses’ in innovation leadership and design thinking principles, highly specialized lateral thinking and bias-busting technique programs, and team discussions around building an innovation leadership culture.

All levels: Our innovation programs build deep innovation capabilities through leadership labs, digital off-sites, and global innovation leadership and design thinking bootcamps.

The Results We Deliver

We took our entire Sony Direct online web team of almost 300 people offline for an entire day to train them around innovation techniques. We baselined employees before and after the program to determine if they felt they had the tools needed to become more innovative in their roles. This course kicked off an innovation program that included topical “brain sailing” sessions every few weeks. The post workshop survey demonstrated a positive correlation between participating in this event and employee engagement/morale. In addition, the team filed several patents in the 6 weeks after this workshop, which they had not done before.

Senior Manager, Innovation Center
Sony Electronics

The customization of the BTS learning process was a critical enabler of our success. The relevancy of the design accompanied by a strong team of facilitators at BTS made the learning experience very rich and impactful. The multitude of tools highlighted in the session will play a key role in driving higher levels of innovative activity as they are implemented into how we lead within our organization.

Chief Learning Officer
Global Medical Technology Conglomerate

I honestly cannot believe anyone could go through this training without modifying their decisions and ramifications on customers in the future. As a veteran now of two BTS developments at TI, I strongly recommend this teaching vehicle and BTS’s delivery as achieving first class results.

Senior Vice President
Texas Instruments

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