Reinventing A Company Founded In 1886: Bosch.IO’s Story Of Transformation
In Episode 17 of MING Labs’ podcast Lost In Transformation, we talk to Thomas Jakob, Regional President Asia Pacific of Bosch.IO.
Tune into this episode for the full story on Bosch’s transformation imperative, and follow the challenges and takeaways of their journey.
4 Main Takeaways From This Episode
01Identify your transformation imperative. Bosch wanted to understand how IoT would change the devices they produce. “In the past, we sold devices, and they went into cars and homes, and we were quite happy never to hear from these devices again. But in a new world, this is not a good thing. You are losing contact with your customers. So IoT we thought brings us the opportunity to look at the life cycle of our products in a much different way.”
02 Start with concrete, precise problem statements. After the big-picture vision, the essential next step is to ask, “Where do we have concrete issues?” Bosch.IO started by identifying problems on the automotive side that they wanted to solve with IoT, adding more use cases over time, such as in manufacturing and smart home. Working on these specific issues consistently can render results that build up, instead of a grand vision that struggles to get results, and leaves people disenchanted. If Thomas’ recommendation for people interested in developing digital solutions: don’t start and play around with technology too early. “Think through what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve that and in which way are you going to roll this out?”
03Mindset shifts involved can look different from organization to organization. Bosch had to introduce an experimenting mindset into a classical engineering company. Over a hundred years, people were trained to work to the highest standards, and products had to pass extensive testing. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was alien to them. “You cannot put half a brick out there, right?” So it took a while to understand how the agile development methodology could be applied in their context, and it required a large amount of change to transform people’s mindset.
04Transformation strategy: Create small impulses that crank up the larger engine of Bosch. Bosch.IO was intentionally established through acquisitions, bringing new ideas and talent that could experiment better than the existing corporate setup. They then carry out small initiatives, building a momentum, ultimately cranking up the transformation engine so that it can run on its own with very little effort.
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