Industry focus

Understanding the competitive landscape is an essential part of any commercial due diligence. Luckily it’s no longer a daunting task if you know the right tools, and how to use them. These tools not only pinpoint who you're competing against, but also provide clues into their strengths and potential vulnerabilities.

Let’s set the scene: you receive an investment opportunity - the numbers seem solid, the business model sound. But the proposition is largely online and you have no idea how to assess this. Before diving in, you want to get a first high-level picture of the business; just some quick sanity-checks to understand the basic dynamics.

For many decades, banks, insurance companies and mortgage lenders enjoyed dominant positions in high-margin markets, protected by strict regulation, strong customer lock-in and high capital requirements. However, even they have not been immune to disruption.

Over the last decade, the traditional strengths of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have been slowly eroded. Companies no longer need to own factories to produce goods, Amazon sells anyone’s products, the power of mass-marketing through traditional media is dwindling, talent favours startups, and innovation happens increasingly outside corporate R&D centres.

By the early 2010s, global ecommerce sales had already grown to a significant size. Front-running disruptors such as Amazon and Zalando were aggressively tearing down consumer adoption barriers, for example by offering free shipping and free returns, and it was becoming increasingly apparent to incumbent retailers that the shift to online could no longer be ignored.

Around the start of the century, travel was ripe for disruption. Booking a holiday meant a trip to the travel agent, involving long queues, poor information and high cancellation fees. Fast forward to 2020 and the industry has changed dramatically: booking takes place overwhelmingly on digital platforms, and suppliers like big agencies and hotel chains, stripped of the advantages of high street footprint and brand recognition, have lost market share to a slew of independent high-quality operators, all instantly available at the tap of a phone screen.

At ABP’s annual conference, which centered ‘data-driven pension’, Alexandra and Henriëtte highlighted #data and #AI as gamechangers to make customer propositions better, faster and cheaper. #Customercentric automation of decision-making should be at every Board’s agenda. Learn more about the rapidly changing pension market in the article below.

By the mid-2010s, consumer adoption of digital was widespread, but in industrial B2B markets it was still in its infancy. However, strongly influenced by their consumer experiences, business customers were starting to ask why their B2B interactions were so slow, opaque, and dated in feel in comparison. At the same time, advanced analytics took a leap, which started to enable the more complex tailored solutions that are required in the B2B marketplace. New and front-running players embraced digital and gained significant traction, which applied urgent pressure on traditional players.

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.

AI, machine learning, big data – is your head spinning from these topics popping up everywhere, yet you know too well you should “do something with it”? To support business leaders who want to get started with data, but struggle with the “how, what and where”, we developed a second edition of our well-received masterclass “Make Disruption Work” – one that centers on exactly these topics.

While remote working can be a substitute for desk jobs, things are quite different in a (B2B) sales environment, which usually relies on face-to-face interactions. This situation requires a shift in way-of-working, as well as an unexpected surge in digital commerce and customer engagement. In this article, we share our thinking on how to keep the engine running in (B2B) sales, while being unable to physically visit customers.

Over the past few weeks, our main focus has been with the health and wellbeing of our families, friends, and employees. All of us had to think of pragmatic solutions to make this new life work. B2B business leaders asked themselves: “How do I keep my factory operational with public transport being shut down?”

Over the past decade, SparkOptimus has nurtured “disruptive thinking” to make disruption work. The crux of this thinking is to let go of daily routines and think out-of-the-box about how to better serve (existing or new) customers, putting their needs first rather than products or services. Interestingly, the COVID-19 outbreak forced us all to apply disruptive thinking, maybe without even noticing. Jobs that couldn’t be done from home suddenly could and supply chain gaps were filled by local sourcing. Digitization is further accelerated, with new challenges but also opportunities ahead, as we are moving towards a “1.5-meter-distance-society”.

As digital disruption has become a major force across industries, organizations have responded with significant investments in digital transformation.[1] Unfortunately, recent research suggests that most of these efforts fail to meet or exceed expectations.

With people all over the world being urged to stay at home, digital is quickly becoming the new normal, resulting in a sudden increase in the urgency of digitization and a further acceleration of digital businesses, both in direct-to-consumer and in business-to-business markets.

The history of retail is, in one sense, the history of data technologies. From the ancient clay tablets first used to tally grain, to standardised account ledgers, to digitised computer spreadsheets; commerce has driven the development of technologies that enable the collection and use of data. And as each new technology has emerged, businesses have adopted it across the board.