How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 1

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own gameSix things stopping you from innovating at hyper-speed, and how to overcome them

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 2

The digital disruption mythRead the business media, and you might be forgiven for thinking that game-changing digital innovation only ever comes from startups From Uber’s takeover of the taxi industry, to Airbnb’s ravaging of the hospitality trade, to Amazon’s filleting of the traditional bookstore model, we’re encouraged to believe that nimble digital innovators are undermining established businesses everywhere. The “disruptive startup” narrative is so powerful that business leaders polled by business school IMD in 2015 said they believe four out of the 10 currently top-ranked companies in their sector will be rendered obsolete by 20201.

1 IMD, The Digital Vortex, June 2015

Traditional businesses can be innovators, tooBut where’s the law that says disruption must always come from new entrants? Mature organizations are full of smart, intelligent, motivated people with great ideas, not to mention terabytes of data on their customers’ thoughts, behaviors and preferences. So why shouldn’t the next game-changing digital innovation come from a traditional organization, rather than a startup? What’s stopping traditional companies from innovating? What’s stopping your company from innovating? In our work with established businesses on both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve identified six major inhibitors that stand between traditional organizations and game-changing digital innovation. The good news is, most of them are easier to overcome than you might think

In this ebook:

Six barriers to digital innovation – and how to topple themIn this ebook we’ll explore those six innovation barriers in turn, and set out what your team, department or organization as a whole can do to overcome them. Along the way, we’ll also showcase four organizations that have beaten these obstacles to become true digital innovators.

Happy reading!

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 3

Who is MATS?MATS is on a mission to make things better for people who make things better. Organizations worldwide use MATS to deliver new apps and services that simplify operations and transform the customer experience. Whether you’re a process ninja, CX pro, innovation leader or IT chief, our Low-code application development platform will help you design, test and implement new digital services before your competitors do.

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 4

Barrier #1: Lack of an innovation strategyA lack of a strategic approach to innovation is a fundamental problem for many large organizations. The ability to imagine where the organization needs to be in five or ten years’ time, and put in place an innovation strategy that will transform the business in order to achieve these goals, is extremely rare.

More often, large organizations approach “innovation” in ways that fail to have a transformational impact. Some set up a dedicated “labs” team to experiment with new ideas, but these are kept separate from the main business and its standard operating model. Others spin off their brightest minds into a separate business entity, which is often killed off when it starts to threaten the main business.

“Innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.”

McKinsey & Co, The Eight Essentials of Innovation

A lack of a strategic approach to innovation is a fundamental problem for many large organizations. The ability to imagine where the organization needs to be in five or ten years’ time, and put in place an innovation strategy that will transform the business in order to achieve these goals, is extremely rare.

How to fix it

For innovation to truly transform an established business, it has to tie into long-term business goals, and everyone must be aware of those goals and have bought into them.

It’s essential for a clear vision and strategy for change to be in place, and for senior management to fully embrace and evangelize it. Without that clear vision, documented strategy and senior buy-in, any innovation attempts will either run out of steam, or be crushed by the weight of the organization’s existing processes, entrenched attitudes and resistance to change.

“Unless the CEO makes innovation a priority, it won’t happen. Innovation requires a level of risk-taking and failure that’s impossible without executive air cover. The best growth companies create a culture of innovation.”

Harvard Division of Continuing Education, Four Innovation Tactics of Growth Companies 

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 5

Innovation in action: Adur & Worthing Councils

The challenge

The merged district and borough councils of Adur & Worthing appointed a new chief executive in 2013. He set out to transform the councils from organizations that were viewed as “static, stagnant, solid, risk-averse, bureaucratic, slow to respond and frustrating to deal with” into “a Council that operates in a more adaptive way” to support citizens, businesses, partners and its own employees.

Part of what made the councils so slow to respond was their reliance on more than 400 legacy IT systems, which were expensive to maintain and slow to update. They also duplicated effort, were poorly integrated with each other and the website, and perpetuated inefficient, paper-based processes.

The solution

The councils embarked on a complete digital reboot, taking service-delivery innovators like Airbnb as inspiration, and appointing digital strategy consultancy Methods Digital to guide the transformation.

With an ambition to drastically reduce the legacy IT estate, the team set about building a “Citizen Platform” for digital service delivery. It has just three core components: Google for Work to make employees more productive; Salesforce.com to handle citizen interactions; and MATS to redesign service delivery processes and quickly build modern applications to automate them.

MATS was chosen for its Low-code approach and platform licensing. Not only can non-technical staff design and build new applications quickly in MATS, it’s also far more cost-effective than licensing a slew of SaaS applications. In an era of austerity cuts, considerations like these matter a lot.

The results

Applications built in MATS are starting to have a major impact, with new, efficient, digital processes transforming everything from waste management to onboarding new recruits. Within 11 months, the councils reported a forecast annual saving of £200,000 in lower IT costs and other efficiencies.

Just as importantly, the councils are also improving customer experience for citizens, and are increasingly able to support mobile and digital ways of engaging with citizens, employees and sub-contractors.

Today, council employees with ideas for service delivery improvements can model and test them instantly in MATS, without having to wait for a response from an external IT provider. The councils are in full control of application development and delivery; they have a new platform to deliver digital services; and are projecting savings into the millions. In recognition of their vision and achievements, the councils were awarded Socitm’s Digital Innovation Award for 2015.

“We’re no longer beholden to external IT suppliers and their timelines. We control application development and delivery in-house, and because it’s Low-code, we can do it fast and at low cost.”

Paul Brewer, director of digital and resources, Adur & Worthing Councils

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 6

Most large organizations have pockets of motivated, intrapreneurial, can-do people, who have a clear vision of how things could be done better, and the drive and will to make it happen. The problem is that most large organizations also have a much bigger population of people – usually managers who have worked their way up – who are comfortable doing things in a certain way. These people are often far happier to keep doing those same things until they retire, rather than embrace new and radically different ways of working – especially if there’s a risk that those new ways may put them out of a job.

If the organization has no strategy for innovation, and no senior executive commitment to it, the enthusiasm of the motivated group will almost certainly be crushed by the inertia of the “we’ve always done it this way” contingent. If someone proposes an idea for a new customer-facing application, for example, and the response is to propose a 12-month feasibility study followed by a 12-month IT procurement process, the spark of innovative thinking is quickly extinguished. And if the project does go ahead after due process has been followed, it’s almost certainly already obsolete by the time it’s completed.

“While 75% of large companies judge themselves as sufficiently entrepreneurial, 75% of those entrepreneurs who previously worked at large companies left because they did not feel they could be entrepreneurial there.”

Harnessing the Power of Entrepreneurs to Open Innovation

How to fix it

Once the innovation strategy is in place, organizations must create an environment in which intellectual curiosity, challenging of the status quo and experimentation are actively encouraged, at all levels. This doesn’t just mean giving the natural intrapreneurs the time and tools to test out their ideas (although that is critical). It means encouraging and enabling everyone to participate in designing the future of the organization.

That means putting in place an organization-wide framework to enable innovation to happen, and changing entrenched mindsets by actively including them in innovation efforts and discussions. Not many traditional organizations are equipped to drive this kind of all-pervasive approach themselves, so partnering with experts that can teach everyone how to innovate is almost certainly the surest way to success.

“We don’t expect someone without training to build a discounted cash flow model or develop a marketing segmentation. So why do we expect our colleagues and leaders to suddenly manifest an ability to innovate? Like any other business function or discipline, innovation has tradecraft that we can learn, practice and hone.”

Forbes, You’re Doing Innovation Wrong

Barrier #2: Entrenched attitudes

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 7

Innovation in action: Thomas Cook Group

The challenge

Thomas Cook Group wanted to reduce the time taken to resolve customer complaints, since its previous complaint-handling processes were siloed by different systems and processes. The result was a lack of communication, long times to resolution and overall customer frustration.

These problems didn’t just affect customers. Staff on the ground at Thomas Cook resorts also felt the pain as the existing processes did not empower them to resolve customer issues on the spot.

The solution

David Spickett, Thomas Cook’s Head of Lean, led a lean startup project (that he called a “test and learn” approach), to quickly design a new, web-based complaint-handling app that resort staff could use on mobile devices, to address customer issues swiftly on the day they arose.

To ensure the app met the needs of resort reps and customer services staff, Thomas Cook built a working prototype quickly, allowing focus groups comprised of real users to trial the system and provide their feedback – fast.

The app incorporated a “system feedback” button to enable users to provide their improvement suggestions directly into the app itself. And because it was built with a Low-code tool, any feedback received could be actioned quickly without hand-offs or delays for programming.

The results

The test and learn approach was a huge success, enabling David’s team to prove the business case in a single resort pilot, without significant upfront investment and avoiding a projected 12-month IT delay. Average complaint resolution time dropped from 28 days to less than seven.

The proven and refined app was then immediately rolled out to all 92 resorts. So now the majority of issues are fully resolved before a customer travels home, meaning better holidays and happier customers, and far less workload for back-office customer relations staff.

“This was probably the fastest process

and systems improvement project we’ve

seen in the business.”

David Spickett, Head of Lean, Thomas Cook Group

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 8

Even if an organization has a documented innovation strategy, senior commitment to innovation and an intrapreneurial mindset across the business, it can still fall down if there is no process in place to enable innovation to happen in line with the strategy.

Quite often in mature businesses, the “innovation process” is geared more towards incremental improvements to existing ways of working, rather than wholesale changes in the way things are done. Lean and Six Sigma, for example, are extremely popular methodologies that emphasize continuous improvement over disruptive change.

So even in organizations where the leadership team has an appetite for innovation; management practices, methodologies and commercial restraints may foster “paralysis by analysis” rather than a spirit of experimentation.

“Only 35% of 6,344 companies who said that improving their ability to innovate is an important initiative said that they were formalizing innovation processes.”

Forrester Research, The New Economics of Experimentation

And in organizations where “innovation” relies on external partners (e.g. outsourced IT shops or traditional management consultants); rapid experimentation and innovation efforts cannot get off the ground due to rigid contracts, waterfall development processes, and budgetary constraints.

How to fix itWhat’s required here is to approach innovation in a different way. Do you really need an expensive management consultancy to come and conduct a six-month evaluation of how your customer service could be done better? Or is this something your frontline customer service agents – who are talking to your customers every single day – could tell you right now?

And do you really need an outsourced IT partner to go through an extensive requirements-gathering process, spend months developing a new application, and further months fixing everything that’s wrong with it, when your customer service team could be designing a new process – and testing it with actual customers – in days?

This kind of innovation approach costs very little and saves vast amounts of time, which leaves much more scope for experimentation. Even if an experiment fails, it has cost very little in terms of time or money. And if you’re going to make radical changes, knowing what doesn’t work is just as important as knowing what does.

“When we start seeing innovation as a discipline, we also start focusing on what works and what doesn’t—and we set goals and measure results. This means paying attention to which inputs yield better outputs; did our time spent brainstorming in a room yield better ideas (doubtful), or did spending the same time studying our customers?”

Forbes, You’re Doing Innovation Wrong

Barrier #3: No process for innovation

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 9

Innovation in action: Universal Payment Gateway

The challenge

Universal Payment Gateway is the UK’s only independent provider of payment services. In 2015 it acquired acceptcards, a broker that helps retailers set up merchant accounts with acquiring banks.

This was a paperwork-intensive process that required retailers to fill in long, difficult application forms. Ninety percent of forms were submitted with missing information, slowing down applications and requiring agents to spend a long time helping customers get the information right. It regularly took weeks, and even months, for a retailer to get an account approved.

With strong ambitions to grow, UPG saw an opportunity to make the process faster and easier for customers, and to free up time for agents to help more customers secure merchant accounts. The solution

UPG used MATS to automate the application process, allowing retailers to log into an application and apply for a merchant account online, rather than fill in a paper form.

The team was able to reduce a 25-page paper based application form to an easy to use, intelligent online form powered by MATS. The new form automatically prompts customers to fill in missing information, ensuring that 100% of forms are now complete when submitted. Automated emails advise customers of progress with their application, reducing pressure on UPG’s telephone agents, who can now focus on customers who need the most help.

Because MATS is so easy to use, UPG’s business improvement team only needed a week of training, despite only one of the three-strong team having previous software development experience.

The results

Where it used to take at least two weeks to secure a merchant account, some customers now receive approval within 24 hours. And customers can now apply online out of hours, increasing the volume of applications that UPG is able to process.

As a result, the number of applications processed by the brokerage team doubled in 2015, with no increase in headcount. The team recorded the highest growth of any business unit in UPG.

MATS is now being used as a platform to drive efficiencies in other areas of UPG’s business, including terminal rental applications, support ticket logging and customer relationship management. MATS will be an engine for growth as UPG seeks to become Europe’s largest payment services provider.

“The business is absolutely flying. We wanted to process 50% more applications than before, but in fact we’re doing twice the number of applications with the same number of people.”

Tanya Parker, Operations Director, Universal Payment Gateway

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 10

As we saw in the previous section, outsourcing to an external IT partner can inhibit the experimentation needed to fuel innovation. Traditional procurement processes, definition of requirements, project scoping and resourcing lead to management by change control that is hardly a recipe for agility.

Yet many organizations have no choice but to turn to external development shops; firstly because most of their own time gets spent on maintaining legacy systems, and secondly because of a critical shortage of modern digital development skills.

Burgeoning demand for web and mobile application development, and a finite pool of modern developer skills such as JavaScript, Java, Python and PHP, mean organizations are fighting to attract and retain the same talent. That’s inflating costs, meaning cash-strapped organizations like local authorities and public sector agencies cannot afford the developers they need.

The skills crisis has become so acute that in 2015, research firm Gartner estimated that from 2015-2017, market demand for mobile app development services would grow at least five times faster than a typical internal IT organization’s capacity to deliver them.

“77% of large companies consider missing digital skills as the key hurdle to digital transformation.”

CapGemini, Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for Billion Dollar Organizations, 2011

How to fix itThe digital skills shortage isn’t going to resolve itself overnight. Individuals and teams who want to develop new digital apps fast need a different approach.

For a growing number of organizations, that approach is Low-code. Instead of trying to hire people to code new apps and services by hand, they use a Low-code platform to build a testable prototype in days, at low cost, without having to write a line of code.

With Low-code, anyone can be trained to design and build apps, in a matter of days. And while it may not be a solution for every enterprise app development need, it’s an ideal platform for turning innovative ideas very quickly into real, working apps that can be tested with real users (and put into production just as quickly if the response is positive).

Barrier #4: Skills

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 11

Expert viewpoint: Five questions with Mike Beaven of Methods Digital

Methods Digital helps public and private sector organizations to “unleash the power of digital” by rethinking their approach to everything from strategy and business models to operations and data.

Mike Beaven is Methods Digital’s director of digital, and was formerly transformation director at the Government Digital Service (GDS). We asked him to draw on his experience to answer five questions about innovation in large organizations.

1. Do large organizations lack the ability to think strategically about innovation?

Certainly a lot of organizations, particularly in the public sector, are more geared around survival in response to circumstances. It’s hard for people to understand that making a step change and doing things differently is not the same as being able to react to whatever is thrown at you.

If you’ve spent a long time working your way up to the top of a traditional organization, it’s unlikely you’re going to say “Right, I’m going to forget all I’ve learned and what got me here today, I’m now going to do things very differently”. So just the knowledge of what constitutes a successful transformation strategy is simply lacking in many large organizations.

2. In your experience, how do mature organizations tend to approach disruptive innovation?

It doesn’t happen often, but there are some examples. In the dotcom era, you had Cahoot and IF – offshoots from mainstream companies. That’s still largely how big organizations do innovation: take some of their brightest people and put them somewhere else. The theory is that the new thing will consume the old thing over time, but that’s not usually what happens.

What happens in reality is that the big thing creates a smaller innovation thing, and then the innovation thing winds up the big organization by being brash and not following the rules, until eventually the big organization kills it. However, by the time it’s killed, it’s usually changed the way things are done across the industry as a whole.

3. What do large organizations need in order to create a culture of innovation?

You’ve got to have leaders who talk about doing things differently, who behave differently, and who stick with it even when it gets a bit scary. Then you’ve got to have a governance model in place to enable it to happen. It’s not about saying “Let’s all be agile and put post-it notes on the wall and stop wearing ties”; it’s about having the right processes for the situation you are dealing with.

You also have to understand your own situation. You can’t say things like: “Virgin Money did well because they had a funky bloke with a beard, some snazzy branding

and a nice website, so we should copy them”. You have to have be aware of where you are, what you are, what you’re doing, where you’re liable to go and what your competition is likely to do to you if you don’t adapt.

And lastly, you have to execute. You have to do stuff and see the results. It’s easy to get into that analysis paralysis sort of world, where you fall back on a two-year procurement process, or a nine-month discovery exercise. It feels like you’re getting somewhere, but you aren’t. You need to test things and see the results – even if that’s to find it wasn’t the right thing to do after all.

4. How does the mindset of people in large organizations affect their ability to innovate?

When it comes to innovation, what happens is the people at the top want it, either because they can see an overt threat, or because they can see cost or efficiency benefits. And frontline staff generally want it because they get listened to, especially in agile or lean cultures where the view is that the people who are closest to the problem can solve the problem.

Unfortunately, monolithic organizations are largely made up of a “frozen middle” of project managers, procurement managers, IT managers, compliance and risk managers, and so on. These people see disruptive change as a threat to their livelihoods. They are the ones who eventually stifle and kill the creative organ – although it generally survives long enough to move the game on.

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 12

5. Is it possible to turn the “frozen middle” to be in favor of disruptive change?

This the big challenge. Most of the initiatives I’ve seen have never really tackled it. They just assume the change is so exciting that everyone will “get it” in the end. But usually, it’s only the people who benefit from it that get it. People who feel threatened by it turn on it. And there are usually more of the latter than the former.

We’ve got to find a way to make these people want to be part of a modern-thinking, adapting, changing organization. There’s no toolkit for this, but I have seen it happen. I’ve seen people who used to be developers and who, after years spent managing outsourced IT contracts, the strategy has changed and they’ve gone back to being devs. There’s a feeling of: “Yeah, I used to quite like that actually, and just because I’m 55 doesn’t mean I can’t be a dev again.” So it’s not impossible.

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 13

Barrier #5: TechnologyIn established businesses, IT has all but lost its role as an engine of innovation. Most estimates claim that around 80% of IT’s time and effort is spent “keeping the lights on” in the data center infrastructure and legacy systems of record that keep the business running. That leaves very little scope – in terms of money, time or people – to conceive, design, test and develop new, game-changing applications.

But outsourcing the work to a systems integrator actively prevents the kind of experimental, test-and-learn approach that drives true innovation. Strict contractual arrangements make no allowance for experimentation and failure, while waterfall-style development methodologies preclude high-speed, low-cost prototypes and pilots. The complex three-way relationship – between the business, its customers and the developer – just adds to the difficulty.

Even when app development is done in-house, both the available tools and traditional models of IT governance are stacked against experimentation. Organizations that rely on traditional development tools and cumbersome BPM suites find it takes too long, and costs too much, to build a prototype for testing. And IT is usually run as a business; closely monitoring resource utilization and frowning upon anything that might look like time or money being wasted. When CIOs demand a solid business case for any investment, it tends to put the kybosh on experimenting with radical new approaches.

“When it comes to experimentation, traditional technology management funding models aren’t applicable. [They] tend to be risk-averse and struggle to put a price tag on money saved as a result of learning what doesn’t work. For example, the typical technology management funding model can’t capture that a company avoided investing $4 million in a doomed project as a result of conducting a small experiment that cost only $10,000.”

Forrester, The New Economics of Experimentation

How to fix it

For innovation to flourish, a single, monolithic IT organization with one set of tools and one way of working is impractical. Traditional IT practices are well suited to “business as usual” and back office systems that aren’t subject to rapid changes. Here there’s a premium paid for reliability, scale and performance.

But to support innovation you need more agile ways of working, particularly where requirements and customer preferences may as yet be unknown or ambiguous. Here there’s a premium paid for speed, agility and permission to test ideas; sometimes fail but always learn.

These two conflicting needs may imply two IT teams or two approaches – what Gartner calls “Bimodal”. Or you may prefer Forrester’s distinction between “back office - systems of record” and “customer facing – systems of engagement”.

Whichever way you cut it, those who need to experiment will benefit from platforms that provide more speed and less coding, and more visual ways of development that elicit feedback from customers and users far sooner in the development process.

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 14

For organizations in highly-regulated industries, red tape makes it difficult to experiment with, let alone introduce, revolutionary new services or business models. And as the penalties associated with non-compliance apply (in theory) as much to startups as to established businesses, why take the risk?

Except that, while traditional organizations choose to view industry regulation as a reason not to attempt any kind of game-changing innovation, startups choose to seek out chinks and cracks in the regulatory environment, in which the seeds of innovation can legitimately be planted.

Often, that means finding areas that aren’t bound by stringent rules, and innovating in those spaces to generate new sources of revenue.

For example, the business of conducting clinical drugs trials is – rightly – extremely tightly governed, but the business of mining huge volumes of trial patient data for previously-undetected patterns is not. That’s an opportunity for a digitally-savvy organization, slap bang in the middle of what seems like an impenetrable, highly-regulated industry.

By getting into niches like these, smart disruptors are starting to weaken incumbents’ grip in several highly-regulated industries, including financial services, transportation, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

“MedTech is evolving rapidly, and sophisticated at-home, retail and self-administered healthcare services will significantly disaggregate much of today’s medical industry. The big question is how well public healthcare services will adapt to these important new capabilities.”

Leading Edge Forum, The Myths and Realities of Digital Disruption, August 2015

How to fix it

Not every area of your business is highly regulated, because some don’t need to be. If you’re a building society, for example, you wouldn’t experiment with how you calculate balances or charge interest. But there are plenty of areas that regulators have little interest in, and which may present opportunities to experiment with radically-improved ways of doing things. (See case study overleaf.)

For a start, any process that currently involves paper forms is almost certainly ripe for transformation. And if doing so makes it radically easier for customers to do business with you, you’re both protected against disruptors with slick new customer engagement models, and likely to attract business away from established organizations that still operate in slow and ponderous ways.

Barrier #6: Industry regulation

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 15

Innovation in action: Nationwide Building Society

The challenge

As the world’s largest building society, with a diverse portfolio of financial products, Nationwide aims to innovate continuously to optimize its customers’ experience. But maintaining a leading position for customer service is no easy task in a highly-regulated environment.

The solution

A Low-code approach has helped Nationwide deliver customer service innovations, such as tailored banking alerts, easier account opening and social customer service. In fact, Nationwide’s Customer Operations team is using MATS for more than 30 different process improvements focused on customer experience enhancement.

The results

The new, MATS-powered business applications have delivered significant cost savings, efficiency improvements and, most importantly, customer service enhancements. For example, the company is saving £6m a year on mortgage processing; has seen a 24% efficiency gain in ISA account opening; and has massively reduced progress-checking calls into their contact center, by proactively pushing the right information to customers to keep them in the loop.

“Staying No. 1 for customer service is tremendously important. We have an absolute passion for the customer; it’s baked into our DNA. But it takes more than attitude. It requires excellent processes and IT as well.”

Ian Thompson, Head of Customer Operations, Nationwide Building Society

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 16

1. Create a strategy for innovation that aligns with your overall long-term business strategy and goals – and get the most senior person in the organization (if that’s not you) fully committed to it.

2. Foster a culture of innovation across the organization by mandating it at the highest levels, and working with everyone to encourage them to contribute to the organization’s future success.

3. Find a process for innovation that enables ideas to be tested quickly and effectively, at low cost. 4. Don’t assume you need an army of skilled coders to build innovative new digital services. With a Low-code platform you can do many of the things you and your customers want, quickly and easily, with the staff you already have.

5. Look for ways to empower the internal IT function to innovate. Whether or not you buy-in to “bimodal IT”, adopting new tools that accelerate software development and open it up to more people has to make sense. Such tools will increase your tolerance for experimentation, risk-taking and failure simply by reducing dependency on scarce skills and outsourcers.

6. Look for areas of your business that are not subject to heavy regulation, and in which a radical rethinking of the way things are done can lead to new customers, and/or new revenue streams.

This ebook has explored six common barriers to achieving true, game-changing digital innovation in a large enterprise or public sector organization. We’ve also looked at what has to be done in order to overcome those barriers, and examples of organizations that have overcome them.

You may feel that the barriers that exist in your own workplace are insuperable, but this ebook should show that, with the right conditions in place, they can be toppled.

It may not be something that can be fixed all at once, but these six takeaways can serve as a useful checklist to start thinking about how you can create an environment for innovation, whether it’s at the level of the entire organization, or of your department or team.

Beating the digital disruptors: Six key takeaways

How to beat the digital disruptors at their own game 17

One final thought: Accelerate digital innovation with Low-codeOne of the most fruitful things you can do to accelerate digital innovation in your organization, and to enable everyone to participate in it, is to invest in a Low-code development platform. Our own Low-code platform, MATS, is designed to enable technical and non-technical staff alike to quickly test out ideas for new applications or automated processes. You can easily design new processes, quickly build a prototype, test it with a group of end users, then build a proper, working, enterprise-ready application based on their feedback. And all in just days, and without needing an army of digital programmers. With MATS, as the examples in this ebook have shown, even the most traditional organizations can innovate fast – often faster than the startups nipping at their heels. If you’d like to know more about how MATS can accelerate digital innovation in your organization, and widen the pool of people who are able to innovate, get in touch. We’d love to talk you through what it can do and show you how MATS would suit your particular requirements.

Ready to learn more?Take a look at our case studies to see how organizations including Thomas Cook, UPG and Nationwide are making this new approach to process improvement and process innovation a reality.

And if you’d like to see just how easy it is to use the MATS Low-code platform, request a demo – we’ll be happy to show you.