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OPINION17 September 2018

View from Silicon Valley

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Impact North America Opinion

Established businesses wanting to learn how to be more disruptive or agile from the tech giants need to look at their culture first says Matt Taylor.

Tech companies will often happily receive visitors from other businesses eager to understand what makes them so different from their own. Quite often, these touring executives visit various tech firms’ HQs scattered throughout the Bay Area, pointing out ping pong tables and taking photos of kooky office features that have come to epitomise (or even satirise) the tech industry.

Always though, there’s the same question at the heart of these trips: how can an established business change to be more disruptive or more agile than their competitors?

It’s a serious question for the research industry too. Firms often have to move faster than the speed of research and that forces them to look elsewhere for help. So, if you ever find stakeholders or clients asking the same questions about how to be faster or more innovative, point them to one thing: culture. 

This is not about suddenly embracing an initiative such as Google’s ‘20% ...