Our latest report takes a closer look at Saudi Arabian businesses and finds that a select group of Saudi Arabian companies are outperforming their peers through innovation initiatives that embrace cloud computing to unlock value and advance business objectives, including shaping new market strategies and reaching new customers.
Accenture's research finds that more than 76% of leaders expect their industry to be disrupted by new innovations in the next three years, especially from new competitors and new technologies.
"As the largest economy in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia plays an integral role in establishing a positive benchmark for innovation that other nations can learn from," said Khaled Al-Dhaher, Accenture's country managing director for Saudi Arabia. "To seize opportunities and achieve economic transformation, businesses and industries in Saudi Arabia need to increase their competitiveness — and doing so requires that they use data and the cloud to their advantage. The wide-ranging impacts of COVID-19 — which include massive disruption to society, business practices and the economy — reaffirm the value of embracing innovation to navigate this 'never normal' phase."
The report identifies several actions that companies can take to target and release value trapped within their businesses:
- Test and embrace multiple innovation practices to redefine the most established ways of doing business (e.g., rotation of talent from business-as-usual roles to "innovation gigs").
- Prioritize investments in capabilities that you can bring back into your "core" to help modernize existing ways of working (e.g., acquisition of artificial intelligence or cybersecurity capabilities).
- Tie innovation investments not just to short-term efficiency benefits but also to the desired long-term performance (i.e., revenue and profit growth).
- Direct investment capacity to innovations that help expand your footprint into new markets.
- Organize differently for disruptive innovation initiatives by going beyond experiments and turning initiatives with the highest disruption potential into new businesses.
Read our report to find out how Saudi firms can unlock "trapped value" and emerge as innovation champions.
