The New Playbook for Growth in the Age of Digital Transformation

Permanent shifts in the digital economy have forced corporations to move from dominantly organic growth to significantly more inorganic approaches. This framework helps corporate leaders develop the new skills and capabilities needed to drive growth through strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and venture collaboration.

The Shifting Growth Landscape Idea In Brief: Permanent shifts in the economy in the era of digital transformation have forced corporations to make a permanent shift in the way they approach growth, from dominantly organic to significantly more inorganic; because of this shift, corporations need to develop new skills and capabilities and put in place new infrastructures to execute. The pervasive discussion about digital transformation over the past several years has clouded the real issue: Transformation is not itself the objective, but instead, a means to deliver long-term value growth. As we described in this original article, The Four Types of Digital Transformation , digital transformation is not monolithic — and it involves far more than digitizing back-office processes. The greatest promise for digital transformation is in harnessing continuously evolving, cutting-edge technologies to unlock new revenues, business models and markets. To capture this growth, corporations are investing in home-grown solutions — launching innovation labs, building innovation cultures, and empowering employees to be innovators. But the digital era has also opened up vast new external sources of growth — where startups, ecosystems and 3rd party solutions represent an increasingly compelling, if not dominant, share of the opportunity set. This is a permanent realignment of the growth landscape, with far-reaching implications for the corporate growth playbook. Whereas historically, growth was seeded primarily internally and organically, going forward, the growth playbook must look to a much greater degree externally. To be successful in this new era, corporations need to do more than just think about growth differently: they need to develop new skills and capabilities and put in place new infrastructures to execute. The Expanding Landscape for Growth Traditionally, CEOs relied on three main strategies for growth: market penetration, consolidation, and expansion into business adjacenci

By Andy Annacone at TechNexus Venture Collaborative