Category: Topics

Innovating your way out of the crisis

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We have a new blog post up on the Deloitte blog, Innovating our way out of the crisis.

In the past few weeks we’ve written about need for management to get out of the bunker mentality that uncertainty and a rapidly unfolding crisis had pushed us into, and how we have a perfect storm for innovation with demand collapsing for the old thing while new demand is popping up as we adapt, and the government is (effectively) subsidising innovation by providing unsecured loans and underwriting payroll (via JobKeeper). Put these together and you have the potential for (some) firms to emerge from the crisis stronger and more capable than they went in. New winners and losers will be created, and so on. That leaves one question unanswered: Where should a firm look for these new opportunities?

Now we’ve had a go at creating an innovation mud map to help find where a firm might innovate. Our hope is for this to be a conversation starter inside firms.

Published on the Deloitte Risk Advisory blog as Innovating our way out of the crisis.

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The government is paying you to innovate

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We have a new blog post up on the Deloitte blog, The government is paying you to innovate. The post points out that, due to a number of factors, now might be the perfect time to innovate.

There is a few reasons for this.

First is that we seem to have a perfect storm for innovation. The pandemic means that doing the old thing is not an option for many firms, with many of us stuck at home and the government restricting how businesses operate. At the same time, new demand is appearing and we all learn how to live in the new normal.

Second, and as we pointed out in Getting out of the crisis, the business environment post shutdown is unlikely to be the same as pre shutdown. The best way to prepare is to experiment now, to learn how consumer behaviour is changing, and start building the assets and services that will you’ll use in the new normal.

Third, and finally, the government is providing unsecured loans and is even willing to underwrite payroll. The government is effectively paying you to innovate.

There’s already early evidence that firms who are experimenting and adapting will emerge from this shutdown more efficient and effective than they went in. Now would appear to be the perfect time to innovate.

Published on the Deloitte Innovation blog, 20th of May 2020, as The government is paying you to innovate.

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Getting out of the crisis: Learning now for the future

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We have a new blog posts up on the Deloitte C19 blog, Getting out of the crisis. the post makes the point that:

The middle of a crisis might not seem to be the best time to think about the longer term. It can be important though, once immediate problems are dealt with, for management teams to consider how their firm will trade its way out of the crisis, rather than just reacting to events as they unfold.

The common assumption of a “V”-shaped economic contraction is unlikely to be true as when restrictions are lifted they’re likely to be lifted incrementally. The more a firm can do to innovation and keep the business running—rather than putting it into hibernation—the more likely the firm is to emerge from the other side. This means that:

An optimist would consider this a great time for experiment, to look for new opportunities, to find new ways to do old things, and to find new things to do.

You can find the post on the Deloitte C19 blog.

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Digital agency and the skills gap

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The concluding report from Deloitte Centre for the Edge and Geelong Grammar Schooll‘ collaboration looking into digital skills in the workplace, Digital agency and the skills gap, has been published by Deloitte, Australia. This report pulls together the results from across the project to provide an overview of the journey and the findings.

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On bland economic models and the colonial mindset

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A team at Harvard has released a new version of the Atlas of Economic Complexity, an index of ‘economic complexity’. Journalists have pounced on the model to make that case—as they often do—that Australia is a second class country run by second rate politicians. The problem is that the model seems rather bland, only proving that Australia is a large country with a small population (and correspondingly small market) a long way from the major markets. We already knew this.

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The new division of labor

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I, along with Alan Marshall and Robert Hillard, have a new essay published by Deloitte Insights – The new division of labor: On our evolving relationship with technology. This is the latest in an informal series that looks into how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing work. The other essays (should you be interested) are Cognitive collaboration, Reconstructing work and Reconstructing jobs.

Over the last few essays we’ve argued that humans and AI might both think but they think differently, though in complimentary ways, and if we’re to make the most of these differences we need to approach work differently. This was founded on the realisation that there is no skill – when construed within a task – that is unique to humans. Reconstructing work proposed that rather than thinking about work in terms of products, processes and tasks, it might be more productive to approach human work as a process of discovering what problems need to be solved, with automation doing the problem solving. Reconstructing jobs took this a step further and explored how jobs might change if we’re to make the most of both human and AI-powered machine using this approach, rather than simply using the machine to replace humans.

This new essay, The new division of labour, looks at what is holding us back. It’s common to focus on what’s known as the “skills gap”, the gap between the knowledge and skills the worker has and those required by the new technology. What’s often forgotten is that there’s also an emotional angle. The introduction of the word processor, for example, streamlined the production of business correspondence, but only after managers became comfortable taking on the responsibility of preparing their own correspondence. (And there’s still a few senior managers around who have their emails printed out so that they can draft a reply on the back for their assistant to type.) Social norms and attitudes often need to change before a technology’s full potential can be realised.

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