C-level executives know that clinging to their legacy business can undermine their company’s future health.

How leading companies invest and innovate to harness the power of disruption.

CEOs are becoming more proactive in tackling the disruptive forces that are changing their industry. But many still struggle to pivot their organizations to new opportunities decisively or sustainably. Some companies remain overly focused on their core business such that they are unable to pursue new opportunities.

Others neglect their core business in a dash to the New, leaving them on thin ice or short of the investment capacity they need. Finding the right balance between these extremes takes more than skill. It takes courage. Courage to radically shake up legacy businesses, divesting some parts while revitalizing others. Courage to scale new investments at the right pace and scale so that they neither miss the moment, nor overreach themselves. Those who succeed tend to lay the groundwork in advance.

Schedule

Track Chair and Host

Sessions

Session 1

Invest

Situation: Swiss industries experience higher levels of disruption (than global average). At the same time, Swiss firms operate in an environment characterized by 1) weak global growth, 2) weak growth of the Swiss economy, and 3) high level of uncertainty/risks due to critical global developments (e.g., US-China relationship, Brexit).

Question: So how can Swiss companies invest wisely to better prepare for the future? As different companies have followed different ways of succeeding, what becomes critical to understand is whether one investment strategy emerges as most dominant across the majority of top performers, as well as whether there are common components underlying different successful strategies.

 

Within the panel we would like to deep dive into a vivid example of how one of the Swiss Top500 companies handles disruption. We would like to focus on the disruption subtopic “investions” in order to frame the panel.

Questions: How does Schindler invest wisely to better prepare for the future? Which investment strategy does Schindler is setting up to be prepared for disruption? Which factors/alerts were most determing for Schindlers strategy? What differentiates Schindlers strategy from the ones their competitors?

Session 2

Innovate

During this session, we will share with you some practical examples on how we were able to co-innovate with our clients and how important it is to work in an ecosystem environment. Innovation can happen in different ways and can come in different flavors. We will also give you some insights about our newest initiative within digitalswitzerland to create a manufacturing roundtable with the goal to bring back manufacturing to Switzerland. Stay tuned!

 

Within the panel we would like to share some interesting research examples and the upcoming collaboration between ETH and Accenture on ‘Human-Robot Collaboration’.

Track Speakers