For many companies considering how digital technologies could or should transform their business models, the questions they face are questions of unprecedented uncertainty, where past experience may be no help.
It’s uncomfortable terrain for many strategists. But it’s familiar territory to innovators, who’ve spent decades wrestling with the problem of how to manage uncertainty when there is little to guide them in getting their new offering to a new audience or market.
But unless your company competes on the basis of continuous innovation, like, say, Apple or Amazon, your innovators probably work separately from your strategic thinkers. That’s a shame, because the discipline of the innovation process is tailor made for addressing the wealth of unknowns that moving to a digital business model entails.