Data, Disruption & Digital Leadership

Since Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, we know that the gravity produced by massive objects attracts other objects. Einstein provided his proof in the early years of the twentieth century. Everything that approaches such massive objects is literally swallowed up by them. The greater the mass, the greater the force of attraction (see Fig. 1.1). It is the same in innovation strategy projects. Many things have to fit together in order to achieve an above-average result. Every participant in a project has their own mass and has an impact on team synergy. This situation isn’t new and has been the case for several decades.

Innovation Strategies are plans that serve to achieve goals. The further you look back into the past, the longer strategies lasted, and the fewer changes there were during the planned strategy periods. Things used to be more plannable. This means that, in the future, things will probably become less plannable.

People who are closer mentally to their goals than to the start of their path are demonstrably more successful. Instead of harboring doubts, it is better to consistently believe in your own goals and the goals of the company. To begin with, we would like to point out what we consider to be the 10 most important obstacles that currently prevent successful innovation strategy work.

It is important to us that you not only learn about innovation strategy projects from a technical viewpoint, but that you also get to look at a basic set of practical examples of how strategy projects do and don’t work. To this end, we have examined a project from a variety of angles. We don’t aim to provide you with basic work steps to copy, but rather to provide valuable insights into topics that were previously inaccessible to you. Please note that not every practical example will be useful for every application in your own company. Sometimes it helps to recognize early on that a particular approach isn’t applicable in your case.

This chapter serves to illustrate the practicability of our approach and to maintain the text flow in this book. It is important to us that every company, manager, project team, or individual decision-maker can understand the H&F High Speed and Efficiency Concept introduced in Chap. 3, in order to make faster and more successful progress in innovation strategy development and implementation. This chapter details further important topics that will help you to advance your strategy project even faster, secure it even better, and increase your personal strategy performance even further. If we were to integrate these topics into Chap. 3, we are certain that this would lead to a weakening of our overall approach, as including too many new approaches and topics would take focus off the core topics. We have therefore bundled these additional topics under the title Deep Diving. In keeping with the spirit of diving, you should first master the basics (see Chap. 3) in order to benefit even more from the Deep Diving topics described here. These topics will provide you with more clarity and understanding of the various process steps and views. Feel free to skip this chapter as you work through the book for the first time and schedule it for a date 6–9 months in the future. You can then start rebuilding momentum using the approaches described in it. At this point, humility will probably get you closer to your goal than too much exuberance.

In the last 20 years, digitization has become an important part of our everyday and business lives. Nevertheless, we are still only at the beginning of the digitization process. In this period, many new technologies have been developed, implemented, used, refined and, in some cases, discarded. However, what has endured since the end of the 1980s and remains at the heart of every process-related strategy, is the management of knowledge using software tools and databases.