Innovating
Are you innovating like a true 21st century organization?
As an organization you must focus on the future, not the past. The world is becoming more transparent, more open, and unicorn start-ups are disrupting what it means to be a 21st century corporation. By leveraging the newest technologies, innovating with new business models, and leveraging marketing network effects, start-ups can penetrate existing markets at breakneck speed.
For corporations trying to survive, you must use it or lose it.
Disrupt or be disrupted, or as Scott McNealy ones put it “have lunch or be lunch”. To be stuck in linear thinking is to be focused exclusively on incremental improvements and cost reduction. This often results in chasing ‘has-been’ ideas and ‘me-too features’, producing cheaper products that eventually lose their value to customers. When working from an incremental mind-set, you’re vulnerable to the moon-shot thinking that comes from a more disruptive approach and delivers new value that you will struggle to compete with. Therefore, to be successful, you must not only focus on sustaining the existing business, but also invest time, research and experimentation on the breakthrough side of innovation. You must place bets for your future business!
Innovation and TD SYNNEX
Despite the fact we are a well-established distribution company with revenues of over 36B$ serving 125,000+ customers in 100+ countries, TD SYNNEX is not immune to 21st century disruption. Traditional IT distribution suffers from small operating margins. Digital disruption is putting additional pressure and results may shrink margins even further. Low margins equate to low operating income, which is not where any growing and prosperous organization wants to be. Therefore, to improve our overall operating income, we are investing in new growth areas and go from being disrupted to the disruptor.
Approximately four five ago TD SYNNEX’s senior leadership team embarked on an exciting project to figure out where the margin pools in the IT value chain were heading. The team identified four new areas with significant potential for TD SYNNEX to invest in. On the back of this, TD SYNNEX developed four new business streams from the ground up, focused on (cyber) Security, Cloud, Services and Data (IoT & Analytics).
Supported by TD SYNNEX’s global strength and financial stability, the four new business streams were given the freedom to innovate. They are fast and agile with short communication lines. This meant they can experiment and pilot new go-to market solutions that either fail fast or succeed and then be scaled out. These new specialist business units went after new customer segments with different go-to-market models from the traditional distribution business. It was like four separate start-ups with the backing of the mothership.
Thinking different through innovation in product design
In case you were wondering, the image with this blog is the result of using generative design technology from one of our core vendors, Autodesk, to come up with the ultimate design in terms of weight without compromising stiffness for a swing arm of the electric motorcycle LS-218. Generative design is an iterative design process that involves a program that will generate a certain number of outputs that meet certain constraints. A designer will then fine tune the feasible region by changing minimal and maximal values of an interval in which a variable of the program meets the set of constraints, in order to reduce or augment the number of outputs to choose from. Now the designer doesn’t need to be a human, it can be a test program in a testing environment or artificial intelligence. The designer – in this case the computer – learns to refine the program with each iteration as his design goals become better defined over time.
The output can be images, sounds, mechanical designs, architectural models, animation and many more. It is therefore a fast method of exploring design possibilities that is used in various design fields such as art, architecture, music, communication design, mechanical and product design. The process when combined with the power of ubiquitous computing in the cloud (that can explore a very large number of possible permutations of a solution) enables designers to generate brand new options, beyond what a human alone could create. It mimics nature’s evolutionary approach to design through genetic variation and selection. This is all about being able to develop and evaluate not 2, not 5 or 10 design alternatives but thousands of alternatives to ultimately arrive at the most effective and optimised design.
Another example of thinking different through innovation
A less popular and known area where AI is being used is in music composition, performance, theory and digital sound processing as well as the way it is marketed and consumed. If you are interested in AI in Music I can recommend you to listen to recent music of Aiva (Symphonic Fantasy in A minor), Imogen Heap (Hide & Seek), Holly Herndon (Eternal), SKYGGE (Magic Man) and more.. Enjoy!
Abel Smit, Sales Director
Data Solutions & IoT | TD SYNNEX Europe