Keeping Your Eye on the Green Digital Ball

Amid turbulent times, it is easy to get sidetracked, and innovation can get pushed to the sidelines. However, during challenging times, this is the perfect opportunity to focus on innovation and digital transformation. Mostly notably staying on track with marrying digital transformation with your ongoing green objectives. We offer a two-step process for reaching the goal: first, structure your innovation efforts by tracking signposts, and second tap into the new opportunities of Green-Digital, embedded within the Signpost framework, to generate value.

Step 1: Signposts of Innovation

Break through the black box of “Innovation” and make it transparent to allow you to organize, assess, track, and measure the state of your innovation capability and readiness to generate value. We have identified six Signposts necessary to focus on and invest in:

Live the process of innovation, from 1) consumer insight identification to 2) the development process of experimentation and scale;
Support it with an 3) internal culture of curiosity and learning and 4) constructive participation in external innovation ecosystems; and
Make it sustainable by tapping into the big new forces of change around us: 5) digitalization and 6) environmental and social sustainability.

Step 2: Green-Digital focus

Talking about these two new forces of “Green-Digital” is one thing, but how do you reconcile the green and digital transformations? A few high-flying cases of how digital technology contributes to sustainability have been documented, widely shared, and praised. Yet, beyond these success stories, very few firms have structurally aligned their green and digital agendas and organizations. We will explore how to do this more systemically: