How digital disruption can drive business innovation

Times of disruption and change can be uncomfortable. Over the last few years, the need for innovation has become essential and digital disruption opportunities are helping businesses stay competitive. Examples include adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to drive customer experience strategies and automation in B2B sales campaigns.

So, how are businesses accelerating purposeful innovation and business growth to use this change to their advantage? What are the current business trends and “new digital opportunities” you can follow to do the same? And, why are agile methodologies more important than ever? This blog will take you through how your business can effectively use digital disruption in today’s “noisy” world.

The digital disruption realization: innovate and scale

Nearly 10% of businesses now have more than 200 apps in their enterprise information-technology systems. In the past few years, the number of applications used by businesses across various industries globally has increased by 68%, with an average of 129 apps per business. Looking to the future, the enterprise software market is expected to reach U.S. $545 million by 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.15%. This can be directly attributed to organizations integrating cloud-based technology. So how do all these statistics link to how businesses can use digital disruption to innovate and scale?

Digital business processes that are cognitively time-consuming for your employees can lead to issues involving business efficiencies. This is where digital disruption comes in to play. Digital disruption is “an effect that changes the fundamental expectations and behaviors in a market, process or industry that is caused by digital capabilities, channels or assets.” It’s a transformative approach to allowing businesses to become more innovative, efficient and can improve their overall business model.

Digital disruption is closely linked to innovation within businesses. It is the process of amplifying the existing foundations of a businesses processes by introducing new and improved digitally-focused versions. It provides businesses with the innovation and ability necessary to adapt to market changes.

A great example of disruptive digital innovation is the rise of remote work. The pandemic saw businesses having to quickly adapt to necessary organizational changes in order to survive:

• 93% of companies had to shift to remote work
• 62% had to deal with increasing customer demand for online purchase and services
• 34% increased the migration of their company’s assets to the cloud.

And the results of this digital disruption? 41% of employees were more productive working remotely than in an office.

So, how can your business manage digital disruption as the opportunity presents itself?

Remove the resistance to innovate

Achieving disruptive innovation isn’t simply achieved by your top-level executives. Complete business alignment and organizational cohesion is key. There are always obstacles to change, whether that be employees who believe in your business’s original, longstanding vision or not having the budget to innovate as quickly as required.

It all comes down to pre-planning, understanding the “why” and the “what”. Why are we looking to digitally disrupt these existing processes? What benefit will this have long term for our business? Making sure to communicate this with your employees is crucial.

The perceived amount of UX work required for disruptive digital innovation can seem high, but with proper planning and having experts on hand to advise, these projects can be broken down and efficiently plotted.

Don’t seek out the shortcuts

Disruptive innovation can take time and requires significant financial investment. But digital disruption opportunities like artificial intelligence in customer service, can have significant long-term benefits. Shortcuts can create confusion and form unclear direction for projects.

Consider implementing a project management team or championing a “digital disruption change leader” who can help keep things on track.

Digital disruption trends for your business

Whether you want to implement new digital processes to avoid potential losses or are interested in disruptive innovation, here are a few digital disruption trends to get you started:

• Master big data with AI

  Big data provides a qualitative and quantitative view of your business and allows you to identify trends in your market that can be translated into creating better products and services for your consumers. Being able to collect and analyze this data with a purpose in mind is the challenge.
  
  Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) applications is a great starting point to mastering big data. AI is able to identify data types, find connections amongst datasets and recognize knowledge using natural language processing. It can do wonders for automating and accelerating data-related tasks, increasing efficiencies and improving the quality of data for respective data modeling and overall business strategies.

• Personalization through digitalization

  Did you know that 80% of consumers are more likely to engage with a company if it offers personalized experiences based on consumer interests and preferences? An example of great personalization is the online retail company, Amazon. Amazon’s digital shopping tool continually updates to create a more tailored user experience based on previous purchases, items the customer has viewed and creates a persona to recommend suitable items. Personalization tools and applications that are available to businesses include HubSpot, Optin Monster, Proof, Segment, Yusp, Episerver, BrightInfo and Bronto to name a few.
  
  There are various digital applications and tools that can help track consumer behavior to implement personalization techniques accordingly.

• Smarter resourcing with strategies

  Outsourcing or offshoring companies are experts at digital disruption. They understand the significant business benefits that can come from cloud-based operations. The global market size of outsourced services in 2019 was valued at U.S. $92.5 billion, with the leading driver for this growth being the 59% share of businesses that turn to outsourcing to reduce costs. Businesses can use outsourcing to help navigate sudden increases in demand, market changes, and to deliver on organizational goals.

Agile business: foster adaptability

How can fostering an agile business methodology help drive innovation through digital disruption? Agile methodologies help businesses adapt to changes in business deliverables when implementing disruptive innovation. Handling digital transformations in an “agile way” gives your organization the ability to manage changes in priorities within a highly volatile or unstable environment. It works perfectly works alongside disruption; always changing and adapting to market changes instead of limiting it.

Businesses that embrace agile methodologies when considering digital disruption, will sustain a competitive advantage long term. These advantages include:

• An increase in ‘market change’ business reaction times
• The ability to adapt and mitigate risk
• Overall project management for both non-technical and technical teams
• An increase in control without risking micro-management
• Continuous improvement opportunities.

What’s next?

If anyone needed further convincing that digital transformation is essential for businesses to remain competitive in our ever-changing world, consider the following prediction from global market intelligence firm IDC. By 2025, 75% of the world’s population will interact with data every day, and each connected person will have at least one data interaction every 18 seconds.

To meet such demands from the ‘always-connected’ customer, it is absolutely crucial that organizations are investing in digital technologies and products. Digital solutions need to be at the forefront of every business leaders’ mind because whether they like it or not, the integration of technology, or intelligent data, into everything we do is gathering pace.