Business transformation: Thoughts on building innovation capabilities

«The biggest threat to business today is not digital technologies or increased competition. It’s loss of relevance and inability to change.»

Why is business transformation difficult?

Many studies over the past decade have revealed an over 80% rate of failure in digital business transformation initiatives (Rogers, 2016). We think that this daunting statistic signals the high-risk that companies need to consider when embarking on a transformation.

This is mainly because today’s environment adds an extra level of complexity to the already tricky large-scale organisational change.

As a company that has embarked on a transformation, we have to ask ourselves:

• What is the digital maturity of our business?
• How can we stand out from our competitors in the new digital landscape?
• How do we know your digital investments make business sense (Rauser, 2016)?

Both in theory and in practice, we find that transformations stand the best chance of succeeding when we focus on four key actions to change behaviours and mindsets: