In their book What’s Your Digital Business Model?: Six Questions to Help You Build the Next-Generation Enterprise, researchers Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner developed this framework in an effort to help executives remain competitive as they usher their businesses into the digital era.
One of the six questions that Weill and Woerner identified is “What is the digital threat and opportunity?”
In a short video, Weill explains what businesses can do to protect against emerging threats and continue to grow. He says that while digital technologies are changing the business landscape, and that’s exciting because of all the opportunity, but there’s also “significant threats” involved.
By studying over 1000 companies, Weill says himself and Woerner have been attempting to understand what the best practices are for executives who are trying to create new value for large companies in the digital age. A lot of it comes down to experimentation: “How much you should experiment and how hard you should push depends a lot on how much threat you face,” Weill says.
He has a set of questions for organizations to answer: what percentage of your revenue is under threat from digital transformation or disruption in the next five years? In the companies they asked, the average was 28 per cent, this means that over the next five years companies have to figure out how to replace almost a third of their revenue. For the largest companies in the world, the answer was 46 per cent.
“The question for you is,” he says. “How are you going to behave differently in this digital era to protect against the threat and grow your company profitably?”
