Hack your company
We are hacked!
As tech company, we are often asked to think about the next innovation step of our customers in order to stay ahead of the competition. Whereas that question was previously posed to specialised consultancy companies, tech companies are now more and more often invited to think about these matters.
Innovation (in order to stay ahead of the competition) is seemingly becoming more technology-driven and less management-driven.
'Survival of the fittest'
This quote often elicits the idea that the strongest survive. But this is not entirely correct. It's the party that best adapts that has the greatest chance of survival. Our customers increasingly often ask us to help them adapt.
A method we have developed for this purpose, together with Tom Gouman of The Bridge Business Innovators, is ‘Hack Your Company’.
In this Iquality Labs-program we collaboratively attack your own business model. We imagine that we are a startup in attack mode. The only goal we have is to topple the business, making use of the latest technologies and ideas. Not bothered by slow decision making processes or weighty and long-term trajectories. In a bootcamp, we test ideas and make plans of attack, in the same way as Uber, AirBnB or tomorrow's startup do. We learn to simultaneously act and think 'Agile'. Employing new technology/apps/websites does not automatically mean you can simply lean back without adapting anything in your business structure and culture. This also includes not being afraid to fail. In this way, you will come to new developments and innovations. Ideas that help you arrive at new products and business models.
The great unknown
Who and where is the competition? This proves to be increasingly unclear.
Where it was fairly easy to identify your competition a few years ago, now, with the great availability of technology and software, it seems to be coming from every corner. In the past, the competition had a large war chest to make strategic takeovers. Nowadays, there is a new kind of competition; a couple of teenagers with a laptop, some pizzas and a squat can invent a completely new business model and matching technology within just a few months. Good examples of this are Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. The speed at which this happens is often a source of envy; within most companies, this takes endless meetings, decisions to be made, policies to be written, projects to be started, etc. In that time, the average startup has already published the first version of their killer app or pitched their business idea to angel investors.
Let's hack your company
Would you like to know more about how and why we do this, or would you prefer to wait until the boys and girls with laptops and pizza have caught up on you?
