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Executives surveyed by the IBM Institute for Business Value indicated that they are dramatically accelerating their company’s digital transformation during the pandemic. And fully two-thirds said that the pandemic has allowed them to advance specific transformation initiatives that previously had encountered resistance.

To better guide others seeking to make the transformation, the researchers looked at which technologies make a difference between high performing and struggling businesses in this period of extraordinary change and challenges.

The “technology mix” recipe for success is changing. Increasingly, cloud and AI are becoming performance differentiators. Not only does technology adoption vary greatly across industries, but the relationship between technology adoption and financial performance varied significantly among industries.

Cloud has become a more important contributor to revenue performance during the pandemic in 11 of the industries analyzed

Tech-savvy organizations outperformed their peers in revenue growth across the 12 industries where technology acted as a performance differentiator.

To understand how the most successful organizations use big data and analytics innovate, researchers studied 341 respondents’ usage of big data and analytics tools for innovation.

Researchers asked about innovation goals, barriers to innovation, metrics used to measure innovation outcomes, treatment and types of innovation projects and the role of big data and analytics in innovation processes.

Three distinct groups emerged: Leaders, Strivers and Strugglers. Leaders are markedly different as a group: they innovate using big data and analytics within a structured approach, and they focus in particular on collaboration.

Respondents were from the 2014 IBM Innovation Survey. We conducted cluster analysis with 81 variables. The three cluster solution was determined deploying latent class analysis (LCA), a family of techniques based around clustering and data reduction for segmentation projects. It uses a number of underlying statistical models to capture differences between observed data or stimuli in the form of discrete (unordered) population segments; group segments; ordered factors (segments with an underlying numeric order); continuous factors; or mixtures of the above.

Leaders don’t just embrace analytics and actionable insights; they take them to the next level, integrating analytics and insights with innovation. Leaders follow three basic strategies that center on data, skills and tools and culture: promote excellent data quality and accessibility; make analytics and innovation a part of every role; build a quantitative innovation culture.

The research found that leaders leverage big data and analytics more effectively over a wider range of organizational processes and functions. They are significantly better at leveraging big data and analytics throughout the innovation process – from conceiving new ideas to creating new business models and developing new products and services.

This article explains how, by combining the power of analytics with the ubiquity of mobile, organizations have the opportunity to provide employees with “mobility” solutions that will enable them to work more effectively than ever before, a new Individual Enterprise model.

The article shows how organizations that design their business and information systems with this Individual Enterprise model in mind can evolve their business models, or even create totally new ones, and thus realize the full transformational benefits of mobility.

Together mobile and analytics will redefine how companies deliver value to customers.

Dynamically configurable platforms and apps will allocate organizational expertise precisely where and when needed, enabling employees to make faster, better-informed decisions.

By creating an Individual Enterprise, organizations will be able to discover, define and refine new and emerging customer wants and needs, and create truly unique, exciting customer experiences.

By transforming in an Individual Enterprise a company evolves from managing employees to optimizing ecosystems; from assigning “a person for the process” to creating “a process for a person.”

Although cloud computing is widely recognized as a technology game changer because it offers anytime, anywhere services, its potential for driving business innovation remains virtually untapped. This article seeks to define that potential for generating new business models and disrupting industries.

The authors show how cloud technology has the power to fundamentally shift competitive landscapes by providing a new platform for creating and delivering business value.

IBM research suggests that organizations are just beginning to understand the power of cloud services to help drive business innovation.

To track how organizations use cloud tech today and how they plan to employ its power in the future, IBM surveyed 572 business and technology executives across.

The survey found that companies worldwide are beginning to recognize cloud's capabilities to generate new business models and promote sustainable competitive advantage.

By assisting in developing new operating capabilities, cloud technology can help a company change its role within its industry or enter a different industry.

This article identifies a new transactional system–the business ecosystem. It describes the characteristics and drivers of these complex webs of interdependent enterprises and other participants which create unique value through synergistic relationships.

The article explains how innovative organizations can seek new opportunities and develop new competencies in business ecosystems they will explicitly create or participate in.

Ecosystems provide stimulus for, and a path to organizational and industry transformation – connecting people and organizations in new and different ways, and providing access to skills and expertise often unavailable outside the ecosystem.

The authors have identified a spectrum of ecosystem archetypes that they call the Shark Tank, the Hornet’s Nest, the Wolf Pack and the Lion’s Pride. They analyze the success strategies for each.

This article methodically diagrams the strategies for success in the emerging ecosystem economy. It identifies the key drivers of value in these new kinds of networks and offers corporate leaders actionable advice on how to position their firms in specific types of ecosystems.

An IBM survey of business, government and education leaders concluded that if left unresolved, an emerging global skills crisis will likely have profound effects on businesses and economies worldwide.

To gauge current skills challenges and assess future needs, the IBM Institute for Business Value in cooperation with Oxford Economics surveyed more than 5,600 global executives representing 18 industries and 48 countries

Fifty-five percent of all executives surveyed conclude that inadequate investment from private industry is the most important challenge to overcome in addressing skills development in the future.

Personalized learning, powered by data-driven cognitive technologies, can enable personalized education – allowing individuals to readily take more responsibility over their skills future and improve outcomes for stakeholders across the business ecosystem.

Sixty-nine percent of industry executives from outperforming companies…indicate their organizations are already collaborating with ecosystem partners to address skills-related issues, as opposed to less than half of lower performing businesses.

Leaders are recognizing that the current connected era is fundamentally changing how customers, employees and partners engage, according to an IBM survey of CEOs and senior public sector leaders from around the globe.

Between September 2011 and January 2012, IBM leaders met face to face with leaders worldwide to better understand their future plans and challenges in an increasingly connected economy. The CEOs surveyed lead organizations of different sizes in 64 countries and 18 industries The analysis also sought to understand differences between responses of CEOs in financially outperforming organizations and those in underperforming organizations.

Key survey findings include: CEOs are creating more open and collaborative cultures – encouraging employees to connect, learn from each other and thrive in a world of rapid change; the emphasis on openness and collaboration is even higher among outperforming organizations; to engage customers as individuals, CEOs are investing in customer insights more than any other functional area; and extensive partnering is providing the edge CEOs need to take on radical innovation.

Three suggested initiatives to promote superior performance are: embrace connectivity and openness; engage customers as individuals; and amplify innovation with partnerships.

Explains that to create greater value, CEOs must take advantage of newly enabled connections with and among employees, customers and partners. Shows that to lead in this unfamiliar territory amid constant change, CEOs will need to learn from their own networks. They will need to assemble those networks like portfolios – with generational, geographic, institutional diversity. Then, they will need to help their organizations do the same.

The authors have analyzed IBM surveys on evolving C-suite technology priorities over several years to find fresh opportunities for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to work closely together.

This new study of evolving technology priorities is based on conversations with thousands of private and public sector C-suite executives participating in a series of IBM surveys over the past decade.

The authors found that the major technology challenges facing corporations are how to manage openness across the organization, individualize customer relationships and invest in the partnership ecosystem for innovation.

This is a meta analysis based on a series of reports on IBM interviews with top executives starting in 2004.

To achieve significant innovation, outperforming organizations are pursuing external partnerships. Increasingly partners are non-traditional – communities of interest, academic institutions or other types of organizations.

The authors identify three key challenges for CEOs, CMOs and CIOs and show how they can align their technology plans and resources to address them.