The walking (digital) dead – Episode 2: (Digital) zombies don't die

What happened previously (read episode 1 here): Despite the simple fact that corporations suck at business model innovation, they all engage in startups, agile trainings, design thinking, acceleration programs and silicon valley safaris. This is what we call: The magnificent corporate innovation theatre. However, what we’re experiencing in reality is the beginnings of a full fledged industrial revolution – maybe the most fundamental one ever, and maybe the final one.

So, sadly the corporate innovation theatre show that we all admired so much, has to end some day; It’s only entertainment after all.

For some industries the show ended already (e.g. travel, media, software), for some it is ending right now (e.g. retail, fashion, sports), and a few lucky ones are still sitting in a theatre near you (e.g. banks, insurance, energy, manufacturing), playing along with some of their friends. 

But once the lights go on, it really feels the same everywhere: People enjoyed the show and go to bed feeling good. But when they wake up there is this terrible hangover and a strange feeling of something horrible that has happened the night before… They look around and… they find themselves looking at (digital) zombies. And worse: Strangely some of those bodies are still walking!

With ‘digital zombies’ we refer to digital products that appear to be a real thing, but for lack of customer adoption actually aren’t.

Just a few examples among numerous others: Deutsche Telekom’s Whatsapp clone Immmr, it’s Swisscom twin iO with it’s sibling Instagram clone Noow, Swisscom/Coop’s marketplace Siroop or it’s competitor by Swiss Post Kaloka, SBB’s Speedy Shop, Postfinance’s mortgage app Valuu or Generali’s on demand insurance Lings.

You can actually just look at the next best digital innovation project around you. Chances are, it’s a digital zombie!

Cute zombies mustn’t die

The thing is, those dead little bodies look so cute! As their managers invested so much of their time and money to create them in the first place, they treat them like their babies of sorts. Therefore, they strongly feel it must be possible to bring them to life. Otherwise, all that money and time would have been wasted. And worse; they ultimately would be considered bad managers admitting a failure.

So those managers find themselves stroking and consoling a dead body: They explain to it that the fat times seem to be over and that the body actually will need to slim down a bit. And to all the other stakeholders they explain that the dead body is well and alive and only suffered through a child illness. It will just need some more feeding and loving care to get well.

Hope dies last, as the saying goes. So do zombies.

Killing zombies

However hard those managers try to ignore the reality of non-interested customers for unreasonable amounts of time, inevitably at some point they start to think about ways to make the zombies disappear. They’re reasonable people, after all. Being nice people, too, they want to let the zombie die in the least painful way for everyone involved.

The managers could just use their no-more-money-phasergun to shoot at the digital zombies and kill them once and for all. Job done.

But they don’t. That would be too painful. They conclude instead that the best way is actually to just letting the bodies slip away from consciousness. From their own consciousness, mostly, and from their direct stakeholder’s, because outside their organization no one really noticed anyway.

They do that for example by hiding the body in some business that isn’t dead, yet (e.g. Siroop was “integrated into Microspot to benefit from synergies”, Speedy was merged with Kaloka). Or they just keep the face up with some minimal funding to keep pretending the zombie is well and alive (e.g. Lings or Valuu).

In the best of worlds the managers eventually manage to slowly dry out the zombies’ financial feeding until they sleep away in peace once everyone has forgotten about them (iO? Immmr? Noow? Kaloka? None of them rang a bell, right?)

Mission accomplished.

After sobering out from the horrors, everyone goes back to the magnificent corporate innovation theatre to watch the next show.

To be continued...

The next episode will be published here next week.

If you don't want to wait, you can read the full season on stryber.com.

Meanwhile...

Get in touch directly if you're interested in hearing our take on "digital transformation".