Transforming Legacy Organizations

CHAPTER 10IT'S NOT A SPRINT, IT'S AN ULTRAMARATHON: AUGMENTING INNOVATION

Model 3 Overview of the three innovation tracks

Source: Kris Østergaard

‘We need to understand what we can use this digitization and these new business models for,’ said Grundfos's management¹ to Marianne Kjeldgaard Knudsen, the current Group Vice President of the Water Utility global market segment, in Autumn 2015. It was clear to Grundfos – with its more than 70 years’ proud tradition of being a global leader in supplying water pumps and solutions to all types of industries and, among other things, securing drinking water and heating for more than half a billion people worldwide – that the accelerating digitization of society would also be of great importance to them. However, how to translate this awareness into concrete initiatives was far from clear, so they decided to set up a digital taskforce to explore this particular question.

The task force, which had senior members from all parts of the organization (CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, and Head of Innovation), formulated an 11-page document with hypotheses about the impact of digitization on the company and set out to test these hypotheses through, among other things, in-depth interviews in a network of leading people from Grundfos's closest partners. In addition, they sent their own digital frontrunners and anthropologists out into the world to observe ...