MIT researcher George Westerman likens digital transformation to a well-known transformation in the natural world: that of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The problem for companies embarking on digital transformations of their own is that they sometimes think purely in terms of simply becoming a faster caterpillar, rather than truly transforming into a butterfly.

This is because they are focused on an age-old boardroom conundrum: How can they meet day-to-day operational needs to be profitable while, at the same time, digitally transforming to drive innovation? Today’s business leaders are faced with change both in technology and in business. Emerging technologies such as machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain are rapidly evolving market demands, shifting customer expectations, reducing barriers to entry for competitors, and introducing new business models — and, in some cases, upending entire industries. To understand the impact this change is having on large enterprises, consider that 52% of Fortune 500 companies have been replaced since 2000.

Those companies that have embarked on the journey of leveraging emerging technologies through a well-planned digital transformation strategy are the butterflies, to use Westerman’s analogy, while the companies that stand pat or make incremental improvements are merely fast caterpillars. But how do they know the difference? 

A big challenge for the company that knows it must innovate from caterpillar to butterfly is deciding on what shape it will take specific to its own unique objectives. Because a new business model is just that — new — it is often difficult to envision what form a digital business should take.

Achieving Digital Transformation While Delivering Tangible Business Value

This is the backdrop behind SAP Leonardo, the digital system of innovation that helps companies plan and execute a fast, structured approach to digital transformation by applying the right combination of technologies to solve specific business problems. The question is, what is the right combination, and how do you create precision and resilience? Will machine learning help the business respond to customers in real time? Will IoT be the better investment? Or maybe it’s a combination of the two?

SAP Leonardo Innovation Services helps customers optimize the capabilities of SAP Leonardo by leveraging SAP’s guidance, skills, and expertise with the latest technologies to kick-start the innovation journey. Developed for both new and existing SAP customers, and with several editions, SAP Leonardo Innovation Services at its core is about taking the customer through an innovation journey with specific business scenarios. Using design thinking principles, experts attack a unique business challenge from all angles and determine the right mix of technologies to maximize the value to the customer.

Often, a customer’s best course of action and quickest path to innovation will lie in adopting an SAP Leonardo template, or accelerator, designed to address a common business challenge. Connected Fleet, for example, is an SAP Leonardo offering that uses IoT technology to track, monitor, analyze, and maintain all moving assets in a network. If one of these accelerators represents the most cost-effective and optimal way for a customer to solve a business challenge with new technology, experts will help with a quick deployment. If not, SAP Leonardo Innovation Services will dig deeper, helping the customer develop a prototype and figuring out how to move forward with an industrialized solution that may even require building out new products. In short, SAP Leonardo Innovation Services brings the business and the IT organization together to help define a business scenario that will kick-start innovation, and then helps the business through the design, development, and deployment phases to bring about a system of ongoing innovation that can truly transform the business.

Your Business, Your Digital Journey

SAP Leonardo Innovation Services is intended for customers regardless of where they might be in their digital transformation. The mindset that business innovation is a continuous journey informs the approach behind SAP Leonardo Innovation Services, where it goes beyond a specific product or even group of products and instead is more about guiding the customer throughout the ongoing journey and meeting them where they are as they move to an innovation platform. Because SAP Leonardo is built and runs on SAP Cloud Platform, part of a customer’s journey could include extending a cloud portfolio with a purpose-built human resources application that leverages digital assistant technology, as an example, or to otherwise infuse digital capabilities that run on SAP Cloud Platform into its everyday business.

Concurrent with this project, a company could be going through a design thinking exercise for a different business scenario requiring a different set of technologies. SAP Leonardo Innovation Services is set up to handle these divergent tracks, which helps differentiate the service from the alternative of partnering with a multitude of consultants and system integrators in a more patchwork approach. The capabilities of SAP Leonardo together with SAP Leonardo Innovation Services combines the products, platform, and support structure under one big tent, providing the assurance that this expertise will result in a robust solution that will be upgraded, maintained, and monitored for the long haul in the cloud by a single vendor.

This approach shortens the innovation cycle considerably because it doesn’t affect the back-end infrastructure. SAP Leonardo complements an organization’s mission-critical business applications, and with the guidance of SAP Leonardo Innovation Services, companies can build innovation on top of their existing, complex solution landscape to avoid the traditional year-plus cycle of concept to completion.

Break the Innovation Standstill

As startups break into industries and disrupt the status quo, established businesses need to keep pace. For a company striving to bridge the gap between the present and future, SAP Leonardo allows them to innovate rapidly, and scale that innovation by embedding it into all applications and business processes. SAP Leonardo Innovation Services layers expertise on top of SAP Leonardo capabilities to help companies make this transformation possible with the fastest time to value. Learn more at www.sap.com/services/leonardo-innovation.html.