Companies large and small are under pressure to explore and put new digital technologies to work in order to increase efficiency internally and compete within the evolving market. Yet despite management commitment to digital transformation, research found that only 30% of transformation programmes met or exceeded their target value and resulted in sustainable change. [1]

Two founders including one of Ntegra’s own believe they have a solution.

Andy Jefferies, co-founder of Ntegra, and Richard Sealy, a Swiss-based strategic management specialist have joined forces to launch Ntegra CATALYST, a digital hub that uses temporary eco-systems to solve defined business challenges. When a company chooses to test and integrate new technologies using CATALYST, they find themselves collaborating within an extended team that has been assembled to achieve a common outcome.  

As Richard Sealy says, “This is the essence of Industry 4.0. Organisations need to have dynamic access to skills and scarce resources and individuals want continuous learning, development and profile building opportunities”.  

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Ntegra CATALYST relies on a company’s willingness to share in the innovation process and potentially share the outcomes. It begins with a organisation identifying a business objective or challenge for which an emerging technology may prove beneficial.  Typically, these technologies involve artificial intelligence, blockchain or similarly disruptive solutions. The challenges, and a primary cause of the poor transformation success rate, are finding and validating available solutions, retaining the skills required to customise or integrate them and changing existing ways of working to adopt and benefit from the solution. When organisations try to do it all on their own the challenges often conspire to result in lost time, money, and opportunity.

Andy and Richard have witnessed these challenges for many years and realised they have each individually been offering only part of the solution.

Andy, through 18 years of technology scouting and client introductions with Innovation @ Ntegra, has built up a global network of emerging technology start-ups, VCs, incubators, and R&D relationships. Historically, he has been able to lead clients to technology solutions and offer integration support.

Richard as been leading global multinational organisations through outsourcing negotiations and implementation of secure and compliant supply chains, but he recognised the conventional approach to sourcing technology and managing the suppliers was not agile enough and did not support innovation.

They believe, between them, they have the solution to allow their clients to move quickly and securely from identifying technology solutions through validation and adoption.

In October 2020, Andy and Richard launched Ntegra CATALYST. They committed to assembling a network of start-ups, data scientists, developers and infrastructure required to offer an “on-demand” innovation team. Although not an ideal time to start a business, Andy and Richard believed the recovery from the pandemic will accelerate business transformation to new ways of working and clients will want to move quickly to validate and deploy new technology. Andy and Richard wanted to be ready to deliver.  

Ntegra CATALYST has been received with enthusiasm by both large organisations and technology innovators. Richard and Andy believed the greatest risk would be a reluctance of organisations to share with external parties. Fortunately, what they encountered was a keen interest to work in dynamic teams that involved external people with diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

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“We were relieved that people understood and offered great suggestions for collaborative projects”, says Richard, “We anticipated project suggestions focused on efficiency improvement, but we were delighted to see a commitment to projects that will bring broader social benefits such as using digital twin technology to stop illicit trade and artificial intelligence for flood prediction”.

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Andy, Richard, and their Innovation team at Ntegra are already working on delivering six projects while a growing number of eco-system participants are proposing potential further projects. It appears people are naturally inclined to share and collaborate on a collective result. Given each project is designed to yield a result in a short period, we should soon see if collaboration is the key to success in digital transformation.

Sound interesting?
Discover more about Ntegra CATALYST and how to join here: https://catalyst.ntegra.ch

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[1] Boston Consulting Group, October 2020
https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation

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