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Digital transformation

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“Digital transformation is the process of organizations (and of the people in these organizations) to use the opportunities, expectations and possibilities of increasing digitization to make the step towards a (more) digitally oriented and agile organization.”¹

Digital transformation is a hot topic in 2020. Four out of five Dutch organizations expect to lose money if they do not digitally transform within twelve months². Digitally transforming your business model has become a necessity for many companies in order to survive (for a long time). Examples of companies that have chosen not to digitize are Blockbuster and Intertoys. Both lost the battle with online. Internationally, almost everyone agrees: there is an urgency to transform digitally.

“To succeed in this new digital reality, every company needs to reinvent itself and build a technology DNA.” ~Forbes, 2018

We at Duodeka often help companies to digitally transform their business model or take advantage of digital opportunities. When we enter the process of a digital transformation, we do this with the duodeka model as guidance. Our starting point is that digital transformation should promote business operations by opening doors to: (1) new markets, (2) new products, or (3) new revenue models.

1. DEVELOP IDEAS

You have an idea for a digital product or want to digitally transform your current business. The first step is to develop your idea. If you have trouble with this, call in a venture builder to help you with this. You can use the following questions as a guideline:
– Which revenue model will your new product / company use?
– What all has to happen to go from ‘idea’ to ‘reality’?
– Who/what do you need to go from ‘idea’ to ‘reality’?
– What is your riskiest assumption and how will you test it?
– How much time and money do you need to go through all the steps to go from ‘idea’ to ‘reality’?

2. CONCEPT VALIDATION & REFINEMENT

You clearly have your idea on paper. Now it’s time to test whether your business idea actually has a chance of success. You can do this yourself, but if you do not have certain knowledge/resources, you may have to engage an external party for this. Ways to validate your concept are performing a riskiest assumption test and/or developing a minimum viable product.

3. PRODUCT CREATION

Is the result of your concept validation positive? Then start developing your product. If you do not have in-house IT knowledge, you may have to engage an external party for this. You can hire the services of an external party, but of course you can also look for a partnership. In exchange for developing the new product, you can give your partner shares in the new company or even start working together completely.

4. LET’S DO BUSINESS

Your product is (largely) developed, improvement is of course always possible! It’s time to start making acquisitions. You can do acquisition in your own network, or use the possibilities of the internet: recruit leads/customers via Google, social media or online advertising. Discover what works for you, experiment and optimize.

BENEFITS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Digital transformation is not only necessary for survival, but also offers a lot of additional benefits:

Customer: Analyze usage behavior and generate insights (customer insights) and cross-media experiences (mobile, social and online platforms).
Product: New digital services and products provide added value for customers and new technologies enable advanced services.
Process: save costs through lower sales, delivery and service costs for a fast time-to-market and increase process and employee productivity through the use of digital applications.
Do you also want to digitally transform your business model and be future-proof? Do you need support in one or more of the four steps of digital transformation? Then it is probably good to work with a venture builder. A venture builder, what is that? Read more here!

Sources:

What is Digital Transformation? – upstream.nl
Missing digital transformation costs money – computable.nl