Digital know-how

Transforming your business can be daunting amidst skyrocketing customer expectations, intense competition, and rapidly evolving technologies. However, there's a silver lining. Embracing digital transformation isn’t just about keeping pace - it's about unlocking sustainable growth and gaining a lasting competitive edge. It's a strategic overhaul that reshapes everything from customer experiences to internal workflows, ultimately driving long-term value.

In the complex world of industrial operations, staying competitive means constantly finding ways to streamline processes, optimize resources, and uncover new opportunities. Generative AI offers a practical path forward, with applications that span the entire value chain. From customer interactions to product development, these ten use cases demonstrate how AI is already delivering real-world results.

This article introduces a framework designed to help organizations create a consistently excellent customer experience across all digital interactions. It combines practical guidance with lessons learned from industry best practices in achieving seamless customer journeys.

In the fast-paced industry of Energy & Utilities, efficiency and customer experience are paramount. Generative AI, with its ability to understand and generate text, images, and more, offers a transformative toolkit for tackling everyday challenges and exceeding customer expectations. Let's dive into ten real-world use cases where Generative AI can streamline operations, boost customer loyalty, and drive tangible results.

In today's fast-paced CPG landscape, Generative AI is rapidly shifting from a buzzword to a business imperative. However, unlocking its true potential requires identifying the most practical and impactful use cases. This article delves into ten such applications, designed to deliver tangible value and streamline operations in your CPG enterprise.

Financial services firms are constantly seeking ways to streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance customer experiences. Generative AI, with its ability to understand and create content, offers a powerful solution to many of these challenges. This article presents ten transformative use cases that can deliver short-term value across your financial services operations.

In our previous articles we discussed how to identify the impact Generative AI will have on your business and its potential use cases across the different business functions. Today we’ll get pragmatic: How do you get started with Generative AI?

It may be a cliché, but in our experience, it holds true for venturing: your team is your most important asset. At SparkOptimus, we fundamentally believe in insourcing core capabilities. In this article, we will discuss when and how you should start recruiting, what is the most important role you will hire and how to build a successful team. Read on to find out more!

In our previous article, we discussed Generative AI, how it works, and its potential effects on consumer behavior. In this second issue, we hope to create some urgency and encourage you to take the first step in using Generative AI.

In this series, we will guide you through the hype, showing where you can leverage Generative AI in your business to create value. We aim to educate and inspire CEOs, CCOs, innovation directors, and other business leaders interested in Generative AI. In this first article, we will provide you with a history of Generative AI, an overview of how it works, and a preview of other topics we will touch on in the rest of the series.

Companies are increasingly using corporate venturing as a tool to expand on internally motivated innovation initiatives. Being a serious player in corporate venturing, however, requires governance rules and cultural dynamics that do not always fit into the existing corporate context.

90% of ventures fail sooner or later, and there’s no shame in that. Many things can go wrong when building and scaling a venture. Although a lot has been written on this topic by the brightest minds in the industry, many founders continue to fall for the same mistakes when building a venture.

The ‘Lean Startup’ book was published more than a decade ago. By now, many people know how to get through the first stages of exploring new corporate venture ideas. The “MVP” terminology has been used and abused and many corporates have added ventures to their innovation portfolio – and if they haven’t, they can rely on the support of the many venture builders and growth hackers out there to help them do so.

Have you ever felt that your business is ready to build a venture but lacks the systematic skills & mindset to successfully reach your goal? Then you might want to keep reading.

As a C-level executive or head of strategy, you are continuously on the look-out for disruptive trends and want to understand how to effectively tap into an environment that is continuously changing. You may already have specific ideas in mind on how to do this, perhaps through a corporate venture or some transformative innovation. But you only have so many hours in a day and may not be fully up to speed on the latest best-practices on corporate venturing. What are the conditions to build a corporate venture? And will corporate ventures work for you at all? In other words: when should you build a corporate venture, and when shouldn’t you?

No industry is safe from disruption. This is because disruptors have consistently found a way – using technology – to serve customers better, faster and cheaper. Over the last ten years industries have fallen one by one: first travel and media, and then retail electronics, fashion, food, and so on; initially in B2C, and then B2B too.

Early disruptors were often owned by private capital or visionary private equity firms. As these disruptors scaled, more capital was needed, and with sufficient backing some were able to overthrow existing markets and create new ‘blue oceans’.

We call it corporate venturing when a (large) established organization pursues innovation by either building, partnering with or investing in a start-up. The goal is usually to explore new (digital) business models or invent new products that are further outside a company’s core and often not expected to become a core activity for the next 5-10 years.

Should all of your digital operations be located in one central location or do you need a local digital operations outpost in every country your company works in? For international firms, this is a critical decision, and each company has their own set of caveats: ownership structure, customer base, and the demands of local regulation all shape this decision.

Resistance to change is a natural reaction. It takes energy to change our mindset and create new habits, whether it is in the private or professional sphere. Hence, this is equally true for organizational transformations. The COVID-19 outbreak forced us to rapidly adapt all professional and social aspects of our lives. The extreme situation exposed our resilience and flexibility creating momentum and openness to leap forward and set up your organization for digital success. In this article, we share with you our approach and learnings from a decade of digital transformations across industries.

The huge – and probably permanent – shift towards digital brought about by the Corona measures has resulted in a surge in e-commerce sales across categories. Businesses had to act fast to adapt to new customer preferences in order to recover their revenues. For example, PepsiCo quickly pivoted to a “direct-to-consumer”-business model by setting up two webshops for their U.S. snacks business within 30 days. Clearly, there is a big advantage for businesses that already have access to the digital technology and resources to launch such a platform.