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Shaping the 2030 Futures Strategy for a leading Technology company built around customers, foresight, business & technology.
THE EXAM QUESTION:
How might we empower the 2030 IFS vision and strategy, through
addressing customer needs to generate opportunities and solutions?
Context
IFS is positioned as the go-to player for industrial companies seeking to use AI through their Industrial AI™ drive. However, they were also aware that the technology they build, must be aligned to what their customers actually want and need in the medium term.
The Mission
While this strategy has AI at its core it also looks broader and weaves together many needed inputs from global and industry foresight and trends, customer research and markets, to business opportunities.
Head of IFS R&D
"Really impressive and interesting piece of work. We needed to hear what our customer actually wanted and how we could address that"
IFS customer
“I think definitely there's so much opportunity and possibility that the hardest thing is prioritising and then choosing where you want to place your chips in terms of like your big bets.”
We generated insights, presented recommendations and created a roadmap based on extensive interviews, exercises and analysis
80+
Customers and staff interviewed across sectors, departments, and external Focus Groups
6 & 26
6 full industry PESTLE analyses conducted with a deep dive of 26 sub-industries with trends and research
40+
Complementary
apps/startups mapped to trends and investigated for potential partnerships or acquisition
6
Sectors covered for market sizing and competitor analysis
WHAT WE DID
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Investigation
We ran research and investigations across 4 work streams:
Futures & Foresight - desk research across industries
Design Research - customer and internal interviews
Business Analysis - markets, internal and competitor analysis
Technology - as-is and to-be AI, architecture and tooling. Trends, and acquisitions.
Strategic Imperatives
Based on the learnings from the investigative phase we identified 7 key strategic imperatives that should be put into place across the business.
Industry futures synthesis
As IFS cater to multiple industries and sub industries, we gave them insights on how each is evolving in terms of its needs and expectations of technology.
Priority Opportunities
We ideated on the knowledge accrued to create 9 'must have' solutions, and 6 'nice to haves' solutions, in a roadmap that intergrates with their next generation architecture and strategy.
OUR WORK
Research and insights
Customers interviews were unanimous in their view on the importance of AI for their businesses' future, however their wider need from showing ROI to how they considered adopting and scaling it provided key input to the strategy.
Technology & AI
Extensive work was done to understand IFS's current architecture and AI ambitions, and then to understand where future trends in AI and related fields may push the art of the possible.
Foresight & trends
Extensive foresight and futures work was carried out into each of the sectors and sub-sectors IFS does business in. These global and macros trends were then focused down to how they affected more specific customer needs.
Custom GPT
Both as a tool for the project and to make the content more actionable for IFS, a custom GPT was created based on all the information found, available and generated through the project.
Business & Markets
A positional analysis of where IFS plays and wants to play, along with its competitor's (incumbent and challengers') strength and weaknesses all fed into how IFS should cater for its customers in the future, and where the opportunities lie.
Deilverable
The final document was a comprehensive artefact that moved beyond thought leadership and content, to give strong actionable recommendations and next-steps like a playbook.