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Recent research conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 53 percent of organizations will position environmental sustainability as a top business priority by 2024.

The 3000 CEOs in our 2022 CEO study report that the greatest pressure they experience for improved sustainability and transparency now comes from their board, investors and ecosystem partners.

For successful organizations, sustainability is an integral part of the business strategy.

Moving toward a more sustainable enterprise is an opportunity to transform and drive innovation throughout and beyond the organization.

While most organizations now have a sustainability strategy, only 37 percent have aligned sustainability objectives with their business strategies. Leading organizations co-create with ecosystem partners in new ways, creating new business platforms, pursuing innovation and aligning sustainability measures.

Because of its effectiveness, process mining is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. A recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey found that 65 percent of organizations report actively using process mining to improve processes. And in partnership with software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to add even greater insight into their processes, 69 percent compare their organization’s data with other SaaS customers. And as many as 77 percent of supply chain executives say they are at least at the implementation stage of process and task mining.

The IBM Institute for Business Value and APQC, in cooperation with Oxford Economics, surveyed 2,000 C-level executives in first half of 2022 from 13 countries in all major geographies and across 22 industries. The IBV and APQC implemented an in-depth analysis of how organizations use benchmarking and process mining tools, the benefits they gain from use of these tools and how they anticipate using them in the future.

Big data and digital technologies also creates new possibilities for measuring performance and revealing process improvement opportunities through process mining ? a relatively new discipline that applies data science to discover, validate and improve workflows in real time.

By utilizing data from IT systems to create a process model and then examining the end-to-end process, process mining enables root causes of variations from norms to be identified using specialized algorithms, and these insights enable management to see if processes are functioning as intended and identify new opportunities to optimize them.

More recently, the scope of process mining initiatives has widened to encompass more sophisticated mission-critical functions, notably human capital, cybersecurity and sales. Organizations that embrace process mining outperform others across key business measures, including profitability, innovation, agility, customer satisfaction and technological sophistication. 10;

Four management capabilities for successfully operationalizing open innovation are: strategy and culture, ecosystem capability, internal capability and technology enablement. Surveying more than 1,000 executives on current open innovation practices and capabilities, IBM IBV was able to identify how the different operating model capabilities interact and complement each other to drive better innovation and business performance.

To help organizations build and improve their open innovation capabilities, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) partnered with APQC to develop the Ecosystem-Enabled Innovation Maturity Model (EEIMM) - an open standards model encompassing four domain competencies required for successful open innovation. To assess the maturity and benchmark the performance of organizations’ open innovation capabilities, the IBV, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, used the EEIMM to survey over 1000 leaders responsible for open innovation at their organizations.

Four management capabilities for successfully operationalizing open innovation are: strategy and culture, ecosystem capability, internal capability and technology enablement. IBV analysis found that organizations that are more advanced in developing the four building blocks see significantly better performance across key financial and innovation metrics.

For every dollar of investment, the proportion of direct revenue attributed to open innovation is four times higher than for traditional innovation.

Leading organizations are embracing open innovation as a critical component of innovation strategy and investment. They recognize that adopting open innovation yields far greater returns than traditional innovation can. Recent research by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV) reveals, for example, that as many as 84 percent of executives now view open innovation as important for their organization’s future growth.

Since the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 – with its ability to create compelling, relevant content, new large language model (LLM) technology – business leaders, especially CEOs, are being pressured to accelerate new generative AI investments. IBM IBV surveyed executives to assess their progress and concerns and their adoption strategies.

Adoption of generative AI is still in its very early stages. Most organizations are only beginning to figure out how and where to make use of it. In fact, as few as 6 percent of executives in new surveying conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value say they are operating generative AI in their enterprise today.

In contrast to many peoples’ expectations about AI, automating tasks is not the top priority for executives looking to tap generative AI to grow business value. Looking at benefits by function, research and innovation is the primary area where organizations see opportunities for generative AI.

IBM IBV's recent survey of executives found that the key barriers to the effective deployment and use of generative AI are linked to security, privacy, ethics, regulations and economics – not access to the underlying technology itself.

Organizations will have to evaluate where in their enterprise the potential gains and cost efficiencies outweigh the risks of possible errors or unintended consequences from the use of generative AI along with broader ethical considerations. Ecosystems expand generative AI opportunities to harness data, insights and technology capabilities from across partners and stakeholders while enabling control over the capabilities that are most central to an organization’s value proposition.

The Virtual Enterprise model expands potential for extreme digitalization, extended value chains and intelligent workflows, along with new partnership and ecosystem approaches.

Analysis of a new survey of more than 7000 C-suite executives conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) provides new and striking insights into what operational, organizational and cultural environments are most conducive to effective and enduring digital transformation.

The Virtual Enterprise re-imagines how and where work is done, re-evaluating the necessity for physical assets, infrastructure and talent.

The single most important characteristic of the Virtual Enterprise is “openness”, which brings value at three levels: inside the enterprise, with partners outside the enterprise and with the wider ecosystem.

The research found that the high technology adopters who focus on “openness” and “ecosystems” enjoy a 40 percent revenue growth performance premium over their advanced competitors.

To better understand the role of creativity and its impact on business, IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV) surveyed 400 United States-based CEOs across 11 industries in 2022.

Average organization size of these businesses was a little over $26 billion in annual revenue. The survey covered a range of questions on the role and impact of creativity in their organization. Then survey data was analyzed to reveal the key drivers and success factors of creativity.

When the CEOs were asked to describe an organizational structure most conducive to perpetuating creativity, as many as one quarter of them identified a hierarchical structure – a structure typically considered antithetical to free-flowing creativity, and one highly susceptible to micro-management and bureaucracy.

CEOs identify fear of failure as the most significant barrier to creativity.

Tapping into ingenuity and creativity has been critical to navigating recent market disruption – and going forward, effective creativity is becoming even more central to business success. Study identifies best practices of leading organizations that believe that. creativity is not a skill solely for a few selected innovators and makers, it’s a quality required across the workforce.

As businesses in a wide range of industries increasingly adopt digital ecosystems, the benefits include opening up new and untapped customer segments and channels, enabling access to new and untapped talent pools and expanding previously unexplored modes of innovation. Ecosystems – defined as digitally enabled networks that enhance value propositions by linking business functions, suppliers, distributors, partners, customers and other stakeholders – are now an engine that drives performance. Multiple studies confirm that value creation and competitive advantage are increasingly tied to organizations’ ability to engage partners and stakeholders. IBM Institute of Business Value’s most recent research has found that revenue growth of ecosystem leaders outpaces others by a five-to-one ratio.

Yet despite these notable successes there is also a dark side to digital ecosystem engagement. Large ecosystems have become a central to business strategy while little attention has been paid to the potential for cyber threats. Increased openness of business operations can result in greater risk.

Security must graduate into a central enabler of business transformation. If businesses do not fundamentally rethink their security equation, ecosystems and the trust on which they are built, which often take years and billions of investment dollars to build, can be squandered in minutes by ever-growing security threats.

Large ecosystems have become a central to business strategy while little attention has been paid to the potential for cyber threats.

Mature, risk-mitigated ecosystems are starting to resemble a mature supply chain, where some risks are precluded by design, some partners are favored based on established trust criteria and remaining risks are explicitly managed transactionally as part of the partner relationship.

Central to the corporate response to decades of discontinuity has been a rapidly growing and increasingly impactful role of data and digital technologies. This article studies that co-evolution.

Reviewing annual and semi-annual IBM survey data from CEO interviews across the past 20 years, IBM Institute for Business Value research has gained a unique perspective on how corporate leaders have used data technology to stay at the vanguard of change.

In 2021, 62 percent of the highest performing CEOs said technology infrastructure, specifically data infrastructure, is the greatest challenge for their organization.

From coping with uncertainty, change and complexity, to the need for more actionable insights, to empowering the individualization of the customer experience and engagement with ecosystem partners, data and digital technologies are now central to helping organizations address their top challenges.

Business leaders must think strategically about how the interplay between data, technology and business transformation will need to be shaped to catalyze even more value for the enterprise and its customers.

IBM IBV research shows that interactions between several new digital technologies and between these technologies and other organizational capabilities enable and drive the business value needed for successful transformation.

Organizations should first identify the high value workflows and focus on what it takes to transform them.

IBM IBV analysis found that if an organization excels at implementing four key elements of transformation together with an integrated set of digital technologies, the revenue impact of a dollar invested is as much as 13 times greater than the revenue impact of a single technology such as cloud alone.

Workflows provide an end-to-end perspective of what scaled transformation will look like while enabling identification of appropriate areas of immediate transformation.

This paper especially valuable to practitioners and academics because it is sourced from multiple recent large-scale C-suite executive surveys conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value, working in collaboration with Oxford Economics.

The more recent emergence of advanced digital technologies and the acceleration of process digitization, combined with rising stakeholder expectations, have created an urgent imperative for organizations to embrace open innovation.

The analysis in this paper is based on a survey 2,379 executives representing 24 industries and 26 countries conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value. IBV researchers used descriptive statistics to understand innovation trends. To understand the role of open innovation for business performance IBV researchers segmented the sample based on two criteria: extent to which the organization sees open innovation as important for their growth strategy and the extent to which they are effective in advancing open innovation.

Ecosystems are key to success with open innovation, creating value opportunities within and across the value chains. 10;

Open and interoperable technologies like hybrid cloud, APIs, blockchain and AI allow for many more ways to create value by unlocking hidden potential in existing relationships.

Open innovation drives growth; new research found that 84 percent of executives think open innovation is important for their future growth strategy.