Dec 7, 2022 | Innovation, advanced technology, Agility, Digital Tools, Digital Value
As the business world becomes increasingly fast-paced and competitive, reacting quickly and flexibly to changing environments has become more critical than ever.
Mid-sized companies, in particular, face the challenge of competing with larger, more established organizations while also trying to keep up with the rapid pace of change. However, the good news is that today’s technological innovations are providing new opportunities for mid-sized companies to overcome the limitations of traditional diagnostic management control systems and gain a competitive advantage.
One key factor that enables mid-sized organizations to respond quickly and flexibly is advanced technologies and digital tools. Today’s technological innovations —the metaverse, cloud computing, AI, and more— are addressing collective challenges and unlocking new opportunities for organizations in various industries, helping them overcome the limitations of traditional diagnostic management control systems.
Example of the healthcare industry
To illustrate the concept, a customer company in the healthcare industry has successfully leveraged technology and its culture of innovation to respond quickly and flexibly. When a major supplier suddenly went out of business, the company faced the challenge of finding a new supplier on short notice.
Instead of relying on conventional diagnostic management control systems, they used real-time data visualization and machine learning algorithms to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and identify potential suppliers that could meet their needs. This allowed them to find a new supplier quickly and efficiently, rather than relying on slow processes that might have yet to identify the problem in time.
Using these tools and being proactive in its response, the company quickly identified and secured a new supplier, minimizing the impact on its operations and maintaining a competitive advantage.
Similarly, agile project management methodologies and tools can help organizations be more flexible and responsive to changing priorities and needs, enabling them to deliver value more quickly and efficiently.
Culture of innovation and experimentation
In addition to leveraging technology and digital tools, organizations can also benefit from building a culture of innovation and experimentation that encourages employees to test new ideas and approaches and learn from their successes and failures. This helps create a more agile and responsive organization that can better adapt to changing circumstances and needs.
In conclusion, the ability to respond quickly and flexibly is crucial for mid-sized companies looking to compete in today’s business environment. By leveraging today’s technological innovations and building a culture of innovation and experimentation, mid-sized companies can overcome the limitations of traditional diagnostic management control systems and maintain a competitive advantage in high-innovation settings.
*I used OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Grammarly tools to generate some of the content for this post.
Nov 11, 2022 | Web3, Blockchain, Community and Crowd, Competitive edge, Disruption, Experimentation, Innovation, Jobs to be done
During the fall of 2014, attending the executive program of Singularity University at the heart of the Silicon Valley, the idea that Blockchain would be as significant to the growth of the internet in the next fifteen years as the internet has been in the previous 25 years started to grow in my mind.
Two market cycles after, I have seen many of the world’s best minds and billions of dollars in investment pouring into the space to figure out how to use the technology to make a fully digital society a reality. The adoption of Bitcoin has increased its positioning as a store of value; smart contracts have enabled crowdfunding, stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized finance (DeFi).
Companies in various industries use blockchain to streamline processes and foster greater transparency and trust. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global blockchain market is projected to grow from $7.18 billion in 2022 to $163.83 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 56.3% in the forecast period.
Blockchain is more than Bitcoin, Stable Coins, NFTs, DeFi, and Crypto.
Considering the pandemic, we have seen that the two main factors driving the expansion of the blockchain market are the financial services sector’s competitiveness and the health sector’s digitalization. Also, growth is fueled by the increased demand for data security, and there is already noticeable progress in the supply chain, gaming, music, and the arts.
Our Web3 innovation practice has been helping firms in the fintech, financial services, energy, healthcare, entertainment, manufacturing, and telecommunications sectors to assess the impact of blockchain and other exponential technology and trends on their business, develop integrated programs to enhance their current business models, create new ones, and gain and track their competitive advantages.
We know from experience that blockchain is still in its infancy and that it has yet to demonstrate its potential to transform the current internet into the internet of the future. But every business needs to dip a toe into the web3 wave. While in most businesses, it might still be early to commit entirely, there are certain areas where the race has already started.
Why Blockchain?
We are moving from the sharing economy into the ownership economy with new ways people organize around a project; communities and decentralized organizations will play a critical role. Blockchain technology becomes essential for business and society if you believe that material contributions should have clear ownership and provenance.
Blockchain is a platform for disintermediation; it is about trust, decentralization, and ownership. Consumers can own their data, and the technology enables tools to reward contributors and user behavior, boosting creativity, collaboration, and digital communities.
Communities are starting to engage their members, simplifying the technology and the user experience, and from there, they are beginning to explore opportunities. Therefore, adoption driven by digital communities will be critical and effective.
When technology is simple to use and solves a real problem, it is quickly embraced by the public. As it is, blockchain will not be an exception. Businesses must explore, build, measure, learn, and repeat to develop the skills required to flourish in the web3.
How to gain web3 competitive edge?
Below are the components of a disruptive innovation system to help organizations embrace blockchain disruption, gain competitive advantages, and make web3 happen.
- Begin with a Massive Transformative Purpose that can be taken by your organization and your community or one that can draw a new community.
- Proactively and pragmatically assess market trends impacting your business to identify opportunities where trust, ownership, and disintermediation have the potential to change the future of your industry.
- Leverage your Purpose, develop relationships, and nurture community; this way, the right people will find you.
- Engage your community, and educate yourself on web3 to better identify the problems your organization can solve and the jobs to be done with the customer at the core.
- Set aggressive objectives and 3-5 measurable key results (OKRs), run experiments, fall fast, and learn quickly.
- Establish and maintain a business rhythm and help your team to identify what they need to create new business models and monetization mechanisms.
- Use data, dashboards, and real-time information to make informed decisions about where and how to invest across the web3 innovation portfolio.
- Understand and measure your key success factors (KSFs), and hold yourself and your team accountable. Identify the #1 most prominent specific and measurement activity to success.
- Wash, rinse, and repeat; and make sure you extend your web3 disruption innovation culture.
Those who don’t start climbing the web3 learning curve may miss the most significant value-creation opportunity of our lifetimes, just as many people did during the transition to the world wide web in the 90s and the second wave during the 00s, where the user-generated content business models emerged.
If you have any comments or suggestions or would like to continue the conversation, do get in touch with us.
Sep 2, 2022 | Agility, Culture of innovation, Exponential Organizations, Growth, IT Services, Mid-market, Small Business
In today’s digital age, small to mid-size organizations must remain competitive by innovating and adapting quickly. They need to leverage their strengths, address their shortcomings, and determine their key differentiators to maintain a strong position in the market. Staying ahead of emerging market trends and adjusting their strategy to ensure exponential growth is critical.
Imagine a small IT offshore services company, ValTech, that specializes in providing customized and reliable IT service management solutions to mid-size businesses in various industries. To stay competitive, the organization must leverage its strengths, such as its expertise in customizing IT solutions based on client needs, its reliable and fast turnaround time, and its excellent customer service.
In the next three years, ValTech envisions becoming a trusted and go-to IT partner for its clients, expanding its service offerings to include emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, and building a solid and loyal customer base that refers new clients to the company. Setting a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound vision for success is important; making sure your organization stays true to a purpose that inspires you and your team to work towards achieving it will attract top employees, lead to financial success, and enable to grow a business exponentially. Your Purpose should be reflected in your day-to-day operations and how you treat customers, employees, communities, and colleagues, not just shareholders.
Identifying your needs to achieve your Purpose will help you focus your efforts and resources on what is most critical to your success. Once you have identified your needs, create an action plan to address them. Improving organizational structure, processes, and culture is critical to enabling growth and innovation. Please determine what you need to drive growth, whether it’s cash, the right people, or relationships, and anticipate potential obstacles that could get in the way. Finally, identify risks and challenges that may arise during the transformation process and ensure your customers remain satisfied and loyal throughout the journey.
Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation to sustain your growth in the long run. Hold yourself accountable and stay focused on your goals. Remember, success is not just about financial gain; it’s about offering better experiences to all stakeholders.
To live by its purpose and achieve its vision, ValTech needs to act on several fronts. First, the company must invest in developing its employees’ skills and expertise in emerging technologies, hiring new talents as needed, and building partnerships with other companies specializing in these areas. Second, ValTech must improve its organizational structure, processes, and culture to enable growth and innovation. This includes implementing agile development methodologies, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, and providing an environment that encourages innovation and creativity.
For example, automation could streamline processes, data analytics to gain insights into customer needs, and machine learning to create personalized customer experiences. To fully transform into an ExO by leveraging the power of technology. ValTech could create a platform that allows them to customize and maintain software for small to mid-size organizations. Furthermore, this platform should be designed to be scalable and easily accessible, allowing the company to provide services to its customers quickly and efficiently.
Finally, ValTech needs to anticipate potential challenges and market changes to achieve its vision, such as competition from more prominent and established companies, changing customer needs, and disruptive technologies. By identifying and addressing these challenges early on, ValTech can stay ahead of the curve and continue to grow exponentially.
To hold itself accountable, ValTech will establish clear goals, objectives, and key results, measure progress regularly and solicit customer and employee feedback. By doing so, the company can ensure that it stays on track and continues to provide high-quality and customized IT solutions to its clients.
Take-home value
By embracing business transformation and a culture of innovation, a small to mid-size organization can achieve exponential growth and remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital world. By holding oneself accountable, anticipating obstacles, and taking action, such as securing cash, building relationships, and hiring the right people, a business can create a roadmap for growth and achieve its vision of success in the long term.
Call to action
Start by exploring how change might affect your business, create a Massive Transformative Purpose, and ideate how you can reinvent your stakeholders’ experiences, internal processes, and business model to become a platform business. Furthermore, make it a fun learning experience!
Dec 20, 2021 | Innovation, abundance, Transformation
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a reality; many industries feel the effects of technological and generation disruption. Airbnb is a prime example of a company that has effectively leveraged the Internet to grow from small businesses to disrupt the hotel industry. Today, founded in 2008, Airbnb is more significant than the world’s top five hotel brands put together.
Successful companies wanting to lead or at least stay ahead of their industry disruption embrace the rapid progression of technological advancements to explore with new approaches what it is holding for their industry. They must be ready to learn from inexpensive failures. They will need to learn how to connect and scale the abundance of opportunities in terms of, for example, talent, data, or capital.
We see fully tech-enabled experiences in traditional fragmented industries such as property management, health & wellness, and conference planning. Technology plays a pivotal role in streamlining the operational complexities of managing hundreds of properties, patients, or events/trade shows and disintermediating these industries by replacing middlemen with little value.
We believe for an existing business, the path is in transforming, not just innovating their industry. Successful CEOs will need to change their core business and build new edge business units simultaneously. This transformation is not a simple task, but it is possible. Moreover, it is the best way to combat the immune system of organizations. Amazon/AWS and Apple/iPhone are great examples of how large companies create new successful business units on the EDGE to drive top-line growth while adjusting their core business and culture to respond more rapidly to changes in the external world.
Exponential transformation is a detailed implementation handbook for becoming an Exponential Organization enabling organizations to speed up their transformation and overcome the obstacles to success. At Escalate Group, we have practical experience creating new exponential business units while transforming your traditional business.
It is possible to remove friction, pain, and cost from traditional fragmented industries, such as reimagining rental, healthcare, learning, or networking experiences and helping to improve the quality of service and increase the productivity of the participants in such fragmented industries.
Oct 13, 2020 | Innovation, abundance, Brainstorming, Collaborative work, Collective Intelligence, ideas, Mid-market, online event, Online Work, OpenExO, Opportunity, Sharing Economy, Small Business, Staff on Demand, Swarm, Teleworking, Transformation
Now more than ever, companies need fresh ideas, creativity, and critical thinking to overcome many of the situations that a world pandemic has pushed us against the wall. In many organizations, we encounter a significant amount of uncertainty when making decisions and face gaps in expertise within their workforce in certain areas that seem to be the right ones to explore for the business.
The power of collaborative work
We are aware there is an abundance of brilliant minds with the experience and talent that can collaborate temporarily as a pool of prequalified workers with availability to share their knowledge. To leverage these external workforces, we hired them for our customers on an as-needed basis to conduct innovation brainstorming sessions, to help companies evaluate and analyze ideas that have not been in-depth discussed.
With this concept in mind, we are addressing the power of Brainstorm Swarms. Brainstorm Swarms are online interactive sessions of two hours where a company team can pose questions on specific topics related to their industry. The inquiries are presented to a Global carefully vetted group of advisors and experts that will provide useful insights, contact, recommendations, and breakthrough solutions you can never imagine on your own.
The power of collaborative work and collective intelligence is a valuable resource to test ideas and explore opportunities from different angles provided by the experience of those who already went through that path.
How to engage in a Brainstorm Swarm
Before going into a Brainstorm Swarm session, we will assess our customers’ needs to gather a clear view of the strategic thinking that the company is willing to get insights and recommendations. Based on that, we will proceed to engage the best minds of advisors and experts who have the experience and knowledge of each field of action to align their inputs with our customers’ expectations.
The practice of Innovation Swarms has introduced companies to fresh thinking and disruptive innovation in a practical and customized way to tune up projects, concepts and recalibrate ideas from its conception to maturity.
If you are interested in knowing more about the revolutionary concept of Brainstorm Swarms, contact us to explore more and start the process of bringing on board brilliant ideas to re-imagine your organization.
Sep 15, 2020 | Sharing Economy, Disruption, Exponential Technologies, Innovation, Microsoft, Microsoft Parther network, OpenExO, Small Business, Transformacion Digital
With a shared goal, we can unlock more digital value for our customers.
Escalate Group is committed to the Exponential Organization framework and proactively leverage the community and Crowd attribute for many functions traditionally handled inside the enterprises, including idea generation, funding, design, software development, distribution, marketing, and sales.
The Microsoft Partner Network is a hub of people, resources, and offerings that give Escalate Group everything we need to build and deliver successful solutions for our customers. We use the network to train our team, create innovative solutions, differentiate in the marketplace, and importantly connect with new customers. Together, we can accomplish more.
Partnering with Microsoft
“As a Microsoft partner, Escalate Group has instant access to exclusive resources, programs, tools, and connections. We are excited to be part of a community designed to foster business growth.” – Olga Calvache, Co-founder at Escalate Group.
Our experience with the Microsoft community goes beyond the transaction. It is a community built around a common purpose that attracts and engaged passionate members. It is about peer2peer engagement in live and online training and events that nurture the community. The interactions around the partner center platform, the co-marketing and the co-selling programs with other partners automate the peer-to-peer engagement.
There must be a better way to organize ourselves. We’ve learned how to scale technology; now it’s time we determine how to scale organizations. Community and Crowd go beyond outsourcing. We believe that Community and Crowd is a fundamental attribute, you cannot be an Exponential Organization if you do not leverage this attribute as part of your organization.
