How Exploration Drives Breakthrough Digital Business Strategies

Are you responsible for building, improving, or evolving your company’s digital business strategy? If you answered “yes” (or even “mostly yes”), then the Develop The Digital Strategy priority within the Forrester Decisions for Digital Business & Strategy service is for you!

This service helps digital leaders across industries — including financial services, travel, retail, healthcare, and more — create and deliver on digital strategies. Digital leaders can tap curated research and guiding tools to help them plan for and pursue their most important digital priorities.

When Developing A Strategy, Companies Tend To Undervalue A Key Factor: Exploration

Exploration does not mean experimenting widely and wildly (i.e., “throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks”). Instead, companies that take a systematic approach to exploring new ideas are the ones most likely to see profitable, sustained business growth over time. Forrester recommends using a continual, iterative cycle consisting of six phases: ideate, prioritize, create, test, refine, and challenge (see image).

Done Right, Digital Strategy Acts As An Engine Of Exploration

Clients of this service can read the research on how to apply systems of exploration in digital business. For anyone who’s not (yet) a Forrester client, here’s three key findings:

• Digital disruption is faster and more chaotic than it’s ever been. A confluence of factors makes digital business inherently fast-moving, and the already-rapid rate of change is still accelerating. The nature of digital technologies and consumers’ digital behaviors has created both hyperadoption and hyperabandonment of different technologies and services.
• Strategy is the means by which digital business leaders navigate this chaos. Going forward, digital leaders and their teams will not just influence a company’s business plans; they will define a company’s value proposition and shape its business model, market positioning, product innovation, and revenue streams. As such, digital leaders must construct and implement strategies that propel the company forward.
• Leading companies focus less on seeing the future perfectly and more on continually exploring and learning. For leading firms, digital strategy is an ongoing process that functions as an engine for continual exploration and action. Albert Einstein affirmed that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Something similar is true in digital strategy: Exploration is more important than vision.