McKinsey recently wrote:
“For many companies—and many industries—the COVID-19 pandemic set off a period of head-spinning change. They realized they were capable of moving faster than they ever thought possible. They went digital in a matter of days, not years. They offered new services almost overnight. If companies sustain this newfound speed and agility, it’s conceivable that more innovation will happen in the next ten years than in any previous decade in modern history.”
In a recent Burning Platform episode about tech industry events, I presented a few slides (see starting 24.05 in the first video. Jon Reed and Brian Sommer go ahead of me) on how the world has been turned upside down in 3 other ways beyond the COVID impact
- Ukraine war and need for energy independence in addition to a focus on emissions
- Climate change urgency and the move to low-carbon in every industry
- Big D - building on early Digital transformations at so many enterprises
At Deal Architect, we have seen what McKinsey is talking about the accelerating pace of innovation from three projects:
Our video series
We have recorded hundreds of video episodes in our Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and New Normal series. Even as tech vendor events and travel have been disrupted, we have had a front row seat on how business is evolving industry by industry. In reverse, we have also seen how many companies and tech vendors continue with business as usual, trying to sell what they had in their bags in 2019 and wishing they could roll back time. Others have spray painted a bit of innovation when the opportunity allowed for significantly more.
Support for IFS Moment of Service book
IFS does very well in physical asset and field service intensive industries. That is allowing them to play in a new world where digital and labor services are converging. In the industrial world, products, spare parts, financing, break/fix, monitoring and other services are being bundled in a trend called “servitization” and these companies are increasingly maturing outcome- based contracts.
CEO Darren Roos and his team of executives including Marne Martin, Antony Bourne and Mark Brewer are all impressive story tellers (each has been profiled in our video episodes). IFS has complex customers like Rolls-Royce Aviation, the US Navy, Juton (one of the world’s largest maker of paints and coatings) and others which have been pioneering the use of digital twins, IoT, mixed reality and next-gen contract management and field service.
Our team had a chance to interview many IFS, customer and partner executives and Darren’s team turned that into an engaging 200-page book, Moment of Service.
IFS handed out advance copies of the book at their Unleashed event last month.
SAP’s Business as Unusual project
While IFS’s book is focused on trends around the morphing world of products and services, SAP challenged a team we were part of to catalog trends across 8 themes. One of the deliverables from the project is an upcoming book, available from Amazon next month.
I would say it has been the most intense project my team has ever worked on (the publisher, Rheinwerk has been similarly pushed) and it has exposed us to new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new capital markets, new networks and new business models, and yes, lots of recycled stuff using circular economy thinking.
It gave us a chance to work with some the foremost domain experts across various industries such as Benjamin Beberness, Hagen Heubach, Torsten Welte and many others. I am not exaggerating – as you will see in the book, each of them could easily be a leading industry analyst in their area of focus. They just happen to be part of SAP. It allowed us to spend time with innovative customers who are driving decentralized grids, molecular recycling, pharma cold-chain logistics, next wave of financial instruments and more. It allowed us to learn from SAP’s expanding ecosystem – not just SIs, but strategy firms, Industry 4.0 enablers, micro-fulfillment supply chain players, digital agencies and a wide range of vertical research firms.
Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier, two senior SAP executives and authors of the book, have built an incredible team and a truly enviable range of vertical products and customers. You can see it in the heat map of industries these 8 themes cut across.
If you can believe, we started with 20 themes and narrowed it down to 8. Which means there is plenty of change we did not catalog. Every one of the 300 pages in the book drips with innovation. There is little evidence of business as usual in the book.
So, yes sure some will keep pining to go back to 2019. As for us, we plan to keep fighting for a front row seat and look forward to a small role in this coming tsunami of innovation.
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