A Shift Actions white paper series

Part 1: Paradox - Everyone is embracing Digital Transformation and yet there is little agreement on what that means

Digital Transformation has been a prominent board room topic during the last decade. While digitalization is sweeping though industry after industry and supporting widespread transformation, a large portion of digital transformation efforts ends up in failure. The reason behind this failure is a low consensus on what the phenomenon actually means and a lack of comprehension on how to actually transform. Hence, there is room for clearing up the air around the topic.

Current state of Digital Transformation in the Nordic business environment is a three-part series of white papers based on a research collaboration between Shift Actions and Hanken School of Economics. The findings are based on 19 interviews with senior management members of large Nordic industrial companies. The white papers represent developing work on the topic of digital transformation

“Research indicates that a large portion of digital transformation efforts fail, due to a lack of comprehension on how to actually transform”

The first instalment of the series, “Part 1: Paradox – Everyone Seems is embracing Digital Transformation and yet no-one seems to agree on what it means”, aims to reduce misconception on the phenomenon at large, by shedding light on what digital transformation means according to scholarly and non-scholarly literature. Secondly, it provides insights into how the concept is viewed by top industry leaders in the Nordic region.

  • Within the Nordic region, there are two primary schools of thoughts regarding digital transformation; one focusing primarily on internal process developments and one focusing on developing novel means of value creation
  • Wider industry characteristics appear to predetermine the speed and approach of digital transformation efforts
  • Nordic industry leaders seem to have difficulties in understanding the complete socio-technological scope of digital transformation

To download the white paper, follow the link below.