“Pivot or perish” is a mindset many disruptors have adapted to changing the industry landscape. The latest Accenture study titled “Full Value. Full Stop. How to scale innovation and achieve full value with Future Systems” further reinforces this belief and proved that early adopters of technology scale faster than the companies that are quite slow in their digitalization efforts.

The study is of a global scale involving over 8,000 companies from 20 industries and across 20 countries including the Philippines. About 2,300 C-level executives come from the Southeast Asian region.

While companies, from large enterprises to small and medium businesses, are embracing digitalization, the speed and the strategy at how they utilize available technologies differ, which also affects the results in terms of revenue and growth.

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“There is still innovation gaps wherein companies have not really unlocked the value of the investment,” explained Ambe Tierro, Accenture’s Advanced Technology Centers in the Philippines Lead and Global AI Capability lead. “The investment happens in silos or in different parts of the enterprise.”

Leaders, Laggards

In the study, Tierro explained how leaders’ mindset helps them propel the company to success over the laggards’ frame of mind. Companies that are evolving to Future Systems are growing at twice the rate of companies that are unable to scale innovation.

“The leaders represent the top 10% in terms of revenue and then the laggards at the bottom 25%,” she said. “You can see that the leaders are those who adopt innovation and technology at a faster pace and that they have people and culture practices in their organizations that allow for the technology to permeate the organization. Their revenues are more than twice the laggards. I think it’s very easy to conclude that those who adopt innovation more effectively adopt technology are impacting the revenue in a more positive way.”

Tierro said the projection for the gaps is expected to increase from $3 billion today to $20 billion in the next five years.

Leaders who believe that there are no boundaries at how much technology is relevant to the organization scale up faster than the ones who have very little understanding of its potential. The respondents, who are C-level executives, also believe that nurturing a culture among employees allow them to implement the vision better.

Scale

“Boundaryless is not just within the organization but also how they play with ecosystem partners and how they open themselves up and make their architecture more elastic,” explained Tierro.

Leaders who adopt early are the ones who develop a clear understanding of the environment and the importance of legacy as well as emerging technologies in innovation. Artificial intelligence, analytics, data, data lakes, and machine learning are just a few of the future systems that organizations need to have a clear grasp to be able to adapt them to their organizations.

Tierro also said the consumers are the clear winners when companies embrace an open mind when it comes to technology adoption and innovation. Companies can easily utilize these technologies to frame, for example, an elegant user interface for consumers to easily navigate, say, a web page for their purchasing needs. Even government services will benefit from adapting future systems because technologies will simplify an otherwise complex system and cut back on transaction bureaucracy.

Investments

Investing in “pockets” instead of enterprise-wide may also hamper revenue growth. Technology investments that encompass the entire organization can lead companies to implement technology changes across employees as well.

“We need to manage technology investments,” Tierro said. “You don’t get the ‘bang for the buck’, so to speak. It needs to be managed at the price level so it is cohesive and based on strategy.”

Tierro emphasized the need to invest in talent as well. Nurturing a culture that is not afraid to change will allow leaders to scale their organizations quite seamlessly, which is hoped to translate to revenue growth, in the process.