Versatile Amphibian

Last week I wrote about a simple framework we're using to help organisations manage their digital portfolio. A client situation I often find is misalignment between how value is generated in the core and how the more radical innovation is structured. In one recent case the business appeared to make the majority of its money from selling products to middle class women, 30 to 45 years old. They had a couple of digital initiatives, which I'd classify as 'top left' - they did access a new type of customer with a new model, but were being delivered in a traditional operating structure. One of these was a high end D2C retail site aimed at rich, typically older men; the other an experiential site that showed 'power users' of the products how to use them in a more sophisticated way. The latter had no sales functionality although it did enable links into 3rd party e-commerce. There were no hybrids and the innovative businesses were located in different countr...

I thought it'd be useful to write a little about a little framework we've started to use quite a lot in Digital Strategy to categorise digital activities in an organisation's portfolio. The background to this is in the work we do to align executives on what digital means in their context and where they have capability gaps. We tended to find a couple of common issues: No one leader has a complete view of what digital ventures were being taken across the business There are rarely enough truly innovative projects... ...and those that there are tend not to be directed at specific corporate goals Organisations lack a means to take the lessons from innovation and apply them to optimise the main business In my experience about 70 percent of the energy (capital, time, attention) of a business should be directed on optimising the core activities. These are pure return on investment (ROI) calculations where a simple business case can be created. At the opposite end, te...