Critical Issues
Navigate the future of growth and innovation with confidence.
2020 Critical Issues
Each year, Council members vote on the most important issues facing their industry, in their region of the globe. The annual Critical Issues become the key areas of focus for member discussion and Council events throughout the year.
Business Model Disruption & Innovation
Increasing Operational Efficiency and Excellence in Innovation
Data Driven Growth
Assuming the organization is mortal, innovation serves as an insurance policy against disruption.
Areas of Focus:
- Capitalizing on mega trends beyond individual industries and markets.
- Aligning talent, objectives, KPIs, and governance in planning for the future.
- Integrating a long term perspective into short term plans.
Merging broad innovation initiatives with operational improvements.
Areas of Focus:
- Best practices to scale by tapping into a larger ecosystem of services, partners, and providers.
- Establishing a process to balance generative and iterative portfolios.
- Building a team of innovation and manufacturing employees to ideate new ways of reducing costs and improving efficiency.
Leveraging data to enable new ways of problem solving to drive key outcomes.
Areas of Focus:
- Extracting value from data to define profitable business models.
- Achieving differentiation through data assets.
- Addressing compliance integrity, and security of data.
Aligning Innovation with Evolving Corporate Strategy
Customer Experience Ecosystem Strategy
Realizing Successful External Partnerships
The drive for generative innovation including white space, adjacent business domains, and blue sky thinking is a top down initiative.
Areas of Focus:
- Nurturing an organizational culture to support and execute the ideas.
- Leveraging existing capabilities that align to your organization’s vision.
- Implementing formal processes for setting specific revenue targets tied to innovation goals.
Solve customer problems by creating a unique customer experience to enter new markets, drive growth, enable efficiencies, and increase loyalty and retention.
Areas of Focus:
- Changing mindsets organization-wide.
- Aligning metrics to business outcomes.
- Data-enabled (AI, ML and NLP) customization and personalization.
Building external ecosystems are essential for future innovation that enables sustainable outcomes.
Areas of Focus:
- Defining an ecosystem strategy.
- Win-win business models (Values, Culture, Behaviors, Outcomes).
- Process (Scouting, Partnership Set, Execution).