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Research reports
An overview of our provocative perspectives
Deloitte Center for the Edge conducts original research and develops substantive points of view for new corporate growth. You can find below an overview of our research reports.
Disruption
Established industry incumbents perpetually face the risk of being disrupted by new entrants using new technologies, business models, or approaches to capture marketplace leadership. Are there ways for incumbents to recognize the potential for disruptive strategy in advance?
Case studies - Patterns of disruption
Explore our cases. Disruptive innovation doesn't just happen at random. History shows that it’s possible to identify specific patterns of disruption—disruptive strategies that, when combined with certain marketplace trends, can topple industry incumbents.
When it comes to disruption, the biggest danger isn’t necessarily external—it’s often the destructive ways in which an organization might respond to a perceived threat. The solution: Aim to take advantage by aggressively pursuing the new edge opportunities that disruptive forces inevitably generate.
Business landscapes of the future
The hero's journey through the landscape of the future
The forces of the Big Shift are driving both fragmentation and consolidation, fundamentally changing the nature of the relationships among businesses
The changing economics of production and distribution, along with shifts in consumer demand and the emergence of “smart” products, are pushing manufacturers to explore radically new ways of creating and capturing value.
A consumer-drive culture of health
The Affordable Care Act has disrupted the US health care market's current fee-for-service economic model. Out of this disruption may emerge an open, consumer-driven health care ecosystem focused on transparency, actionable insights, collaboration, and engagement.
What makes “making”—the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself—worth paying attention to?
The increasingly disparate needs and expectations of individual learners are fueling the growth of a rich ecosystem of semi-structured, unorthodox learning providers at the “edges” of the traditional higher educational system.
Capturing value in the evolving mobility ecosystem
Who will guide tomorrow's road warriors? Looking ahead to the future of mobility, one key to capturing value could be to help individuals get more value out of mobility by serving as trusted advisers—on matters ranging from where to go to how to get there and even whom to take along.
Ecosystems & platforms
No company is an island—each operates within ecosystems. Yet most companies lack a robust decision framework to choose those ecosystems and understand the implications of their choice. This report defines ecosystems and assesses the value ecosystems create, as well as the social software and other technology that can be used to manage and deploy them. What are the potential risks associated with different types of ecosystems, and how might those risks be mitigated?
Properly designed business platforms can help create and capture new economic value and scale the potential for learning across entire ecosystems.
Transformation
Leaders are taking lessons from the startup playbook on “minimum viable products” to launch minimum viable transformations—lightweight and readily adaptable versions of potential new business models.
The Surui, an Amazonian tribe, fought back from the brink of obsolescence by embracing learning through a variety of technologies and partners, illustrating useful lessons for enterprises trying to learn and adapt to the Big Shift.
Institutional innovation allows organizations to rearchitect themselves to scale learning and generate richer innovations at other levels, including products, business models, and management system.
Resistance to change can doom organizational transformation. One way to make success more likely is through a series of small moves, smartly made—following Pragmatic Pathways to long-term change.
To thrive in the Big Shift, companies must move from innovating at a product or service level to innovating across their entire institutions. Unfortunately, traditional large-scale change efforts that challenge the core of the business often fail. Change management is not rational—it is intensely political. The Scaling Edges methodology helps businesses focus on low investment, high-growth-potential opportunities—“edges”—with fundamentally different business practices that can ultimately transform the core of the organization.
By cultivating the traits of worker passion in their workforce, organizations can make sustained performance gains and develop the resilience they need to withstand continuous market challenges and disruptions.
The Big Shift
Shift Index 2016
The paradox of flows: Can hope flow from fear?
Society today seems consumed by uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety, as models and expectations about how the world works have come into question. But our analysis shows long-term business trends remaining both stable and predictable, notwithstanding society’s understandable disorientation.
Shift Index 2013
Embracing the contradictions and apparent incoherency of our present condition may induce institutional change that better enables learning, innovation, and sustained performance improvement.
While individuals are eagerly embracing new technologies for learning, creating, collaborating and sharing knowledge, the data suggests that outdated institutional structures continue to inhibit organizational knowledge flows. The result? Individuals gain more power, as talent and consumer, while companies face mounting performance pressures as they struggle to employ technology for growth, innovation, and sustained returns.
Success or struggle: ROA as a true measure of business performance
Declining returns on assets (ROA) doesn't fit with the stories commonly reported about firm performance and the business environment.
From exponential technologies to exponential innovation
Exponentially advancing digital technologies have led to exponentially accelerating innovation, making the environment increasingly difficult to navigate—but also opening the door to opportunity.
Unlocking Passion of the Performer
Times of great and constant change require companies to be flexible and to grow stronger. We explore how organizations can cultivate and engage the right dispositions and talent. By adopting new ways of working focused on eliciting and amplifying the passion of certain workers, organizations will benefit from the sustained performance improvement that these individuals create.
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