ARE YOU FOLLOWING THE RIGHT DIGITAL RECIPE?

To produce a successful dish of digital reinvention, start by combining six ingredient technologies. Here’s how to get cooking.

Digital technologies have been feeding executives’ appetite for growth, cost savings, and innovation for years. Each one promises nourishment and sometimes brings delight. But how many business leaders are considering the value of combining technologies to create one gourmet meal?

So far, not many. And to be fair, technologies such as augmented reality are still very much emerging. Yet some companies have already discovered the power of combination and are reaping the rewards.

We studied the performance of 800 companies in 12 manufacturing and resources-based industries and 21 countries. According to our research, the five percent of organisations that combined six ingredient technologies – mobile computing, big-data analytics, machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, autonomous robots and autonomous vehicles – lowered their overall costs by 14% between 2013 and 2016. And we found trailblazing “combiners” in every industry and country. Cost savings for those not combining the six? They saw a negligible cost reduction – less than one percent. (We used a broad mix of research methods – See “About the Research” next page.)

That raised even more questions for us: Can this technological combination really work for every company? What makes this combination so special? Which companies have mastered the art and science of combination, and what can we learn from their experiences?

To answer these questions, we examined cases of organisations that are combining multiple technologies. After poring over the results, we