As Entrepreneur.com points out in a recent article titled Building A Resilient Culture Of Innovation For Corporations In A Post COVID-19 World, “…the response of governments, businesses, and populations to the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide has only served to prove that we’re capable of anything if we put our minds to it.”
To change, you need to innovate at a faster and faster pace. The Entrepreneur.com author smartly quotes former GE CEO Jack Welch on just that topic. “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
That seems even more true now.
Looking Forward
There are few bright spots appearing on the horizon. Although the retail market has had several setbacks, Emarketer’s latest 2020 e-commerce projections has Ecommerce poised to grow 18.0% following a 14.9% gain in 2019, further evidence of the digital shift.
In a recent study, AdWeek published that although more than 44% of the CMOs surveyed experienced mid-year budget cuts as a result of the pandemic, 68% expect to increase their investments in marketing tech over the next 12 months.
That feels pretty bullish for 2021.
So, we believe things will get better. But how we all respond before that will influence how well we will perform as the recovery continues.
Which Path to Take?
Gartner recently released an interesting post pandemic framework, Reset Your Business Strategy in COVID-19 Recovery. In this model, Gartner structures the paths forward for various companies (or divisions of companies) with the various paths depending on the industry and impact of COVID-19: Return, Reduce, Retire, Reinvent, Rescale.
The question each leader needs to ask is: which part of my business should follow which path? To help answer that, additional questions are needed to be answered.
- Will the demand of my solution come back with or without changes in a post-pandemic world?
- Do I have products, services, or processes that I should reduce or retire as they are not part of the go-forward market need?
- Did we invent (or reinvent) some new offerings that had increased demand during the pandemic?
- Can we rescale offerings that had demand during the pandemic to scale in 2021?
What the Gartner recovery model suggests is intriguing. They itemize the importance of leveraging the learnings, business impacts, and progress during the last three months. But that takes another push to analyze the market, your buyers, your organization, and your competitors – another hard task.
Culture of Innovation
Many startups are pivoting to choose the path forward that makes the most sense for their business. What many startups lack in resources, they make up for with nimbleness and ingenuity. Larger corporations do have R&D departments, but as is highlighted in the above mentioned Entrepreneur.com article, that may be an antiquated model that moves too slowly for this time.
For many companies to maximize the opportunity along one the Gartner paths it will take an accelerated digital transformation. Some companies are ready and equipped for that, but many need an innovation shot into their culture to make that happen.
We here at Valtira partner with our clients to bring a culture of innovation to organizations. We have learned through our experience the right combination of skills required to do just that – front-end and back-end skills, cloud-native development and tooling, and DevOps. And of course, all in a design-led and agile methodology.
Our experienced team of designers, architects, and developers apply a strategic approach and iterative process to help clients meet their business goals. Although our mission has stayed the same, we have changed as well. We look at the challenges of our clients differently now based on the impacts of the pandemic on each of our clients. But we also look from the lens of what is good for society.
Entreprenuer.com article author Youness Yaghcha sums that up well. “Corporate innovation means nothing if it’s not informed and guided by fundamental values such as inclusivity and sustainability. If these difficult times have taught us anything, it’s that we’re stronger when we work with each other, and for each other.”