Here's how you can stay ahead of emerging digital entrepreneurship trends.

Embrace change, but at the same time be mindful of the associated cost of change. This is especially important when making decision for long-term and heavy capex investment. Because change and innovation are constant, sometimes as a leader, you will find yourself in a position whereby you have to make decision to continue with the existing investment or to forego and replace it with a more innovative solution. This requires very thoughtful long-term strategic thinking and design, and the ability to make hard decisions during the implementation phase.

Embracing change will be critical to fully realizing the investment you are making in adopting a new technology. As a leader, your teams are looking for you to embrace this change 100%, even when it is uncomfortable. If you are only willing to dip your toes in the water, your team will stay on the sidelines. Jump in the deep end and they will follow.

Curiosity can bring lots of knowledge to your benefit. Set aside some time to get to know new information and learn to absorb it to get more perspective about digital trends. It might be overwhelming in the beginning, however there will always be new information, so it's a matter of how we embrace the rush of it and take it to our advantages.

You are one message away to meet a new person. Everytime someone invite you to connect on Linkedin, accept the invite and send them this message “Nice to be connected, why did you wanted to connect with me?”

Networking today with online platforms such as social media can connect us to endless possibilities. It can open up tons of opportunities for collaboration and learning that you might not find nearby. Also, building an online presence helps you get noticed and grow your brand way beyond your circle. It’s all about making those digital connections work for you!

Data-driven decision making is the result of analyzing these trends. Scrape those data as a set to be analyzed and transform to insights. Don't forget to define your audience and segmented the market to get a more precise knowledge on the customer behavior. You can turn the result and translate it to a new product/service that suitable with the customer's feedback before.

Analyzing trends is a critical component to staying ahead. One way to stand out when analyzing trends is to take the 10th person approach. This means if 9 people in a meeting all advocate for a certain response to a trend, consider if the trend is false or what might happen if you take the opposite response to the trend? This approach pressure-tests the response and can avoid group think.

Focus on areas where you have an interest and/or skill and spend time to gain more insight into problems there. Write down the top 5 issues in that space including ones you currently face. Network with people with similar interests and different skillsets than yours and pick one problem you feel you can solve collectively. Share your vision of a better outcome for users once the problem is solved (of course with financial benefits to team members). Most times though, finding the right people with a shared interest and complementary skills is more than enough to build a great product...eventually. Essentially, collaborate and build something people want! Good luck.

Risk management is a core part of innovation. I once lost a huge opportunity at the goal-line to innovate/partner because our risk teams couldn't get comfortable with the newer ways (using AI) that the partner approached KYC rules. My advice - get your risk team involved early and often, invite them to the early-stage whiteboarding sessions and try to gain their feedback. This will surface the major risk blockers and allow you time to find the right mitigations.