Enterprises have always needed to change—to sustain what they have, evolve into new areas, and disrupt the market. Whether incremental or radical, change is always driven by innovation.
Innovation is not an art, nor is it accidental. It is the deliberate creation of new sources of growth and prosperity. Most importantly, innovation is not a choice. It is happening all around us. Those who can keep pace—or better still, drive disruptive models beyond the status quo—are the businesses that stand to gain the most.
"...innovation is the conversion of a new idea into revenues and profits."
—The Game-Changer, Lafley & Charan
For more disruptive innovation to succeed, it must be closely managed to maximise return and ensure that it does not distract from the present goals of your business. This is not easy. But with the right strategy, support, and technology, it has the power to transform your entire organisation.
"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."
—Theodore Levitt, economist
The evidence is clear: innovation is the single most important driver of long-term value creation and growth. Companies that innovate consistently outperform their peers, delivering higher total shareholder returns (TSR), faster revenue growth, and greater market capitalisation growth.
Source: Bloomberg data, Capital IQ data, Strategy & analysis
"The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it'll never be this slow ever again."
—Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada
"We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st Century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress."
—Ray Kurzweil, inventor and futurist
Driving this change is an explosion of new technologies coupled with the rapid adoption of disruptive business models. For every Blockbuster, there is a Netflix. For every Tower Records, a Spotify. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, and others have transformed customer expectations across all markets, not just their own.
The “unreasonable consumer” now expects much more from their service providers. If you can’t provide exactly what your customers want, when they want it, and how they want it, you can be sure someone else will.
Meeting the expectations of this new market requires technical capabilities and a deep understanding of your target audience. Combining broad strategic expertise, a vast digital ecosystem, and unparalleled transformation experience, Publicis Sapient and Microsoft deliver engaging, digital services to your customers on demand. We bring the empathy and customer intimacy needed to meet their sometimes unarticulated needs—solving their problems before they arise.
“Empathy is not just something nice to have. It is core to the innovation agenda. Microsoft’s core business is about being able to meet the unmet and unarticulated needs of customers. There is no way we are going to do that if we don’t have that deep sense of empathy.”
—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
AGTB took on the challenge of becoming the world’s first fully digital trade finance bank to serve the needs of businesses in a digital-first world. With Publicis Sapient and Microsoft, it delivered truly disruptive innovation at speed—from concept to live in a matter of months.
Publicis Sapient provided the expertise, agile program management, and systems integration. Microsoft provided the powerful technology to deliver our shared vision.
By leveraging the Microsoft Azure cloud environment, we gained the cyber security and infrastructure resilience AGTB needed to instil customer confidence and meet the company’s high security and performance requirements.
In close collaboration with Microsoft cloud architects, we brought the architectural design to life—working through 288 connection points, logical and business workflows, as well as setting up the appropriate infrastructure environments to support it.
Services:
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the already rapid pace of transformation. It is not unusual for innovative business models to emerge from crises. As market conditions change almost overnight, businesses scramble to adapt to their new environments—and take advantage of opportunities that arise.
| Consumer Impact | Leading to → | Emerging Needs | All met by → | New Products/Services |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-unemployment | New income streams | airbnb, Uber | ||
| Distrust in financial institutions | Transparent, low-fee banking | mint | ||
| Discretionary thriftiness | Affordable, high-quality products | WARBY PARKER |
"We've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months."
—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
Like many events before it, the pandemic has changed the way consumers behave and redrawn the way we do business. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Business owners, customers, employees, and vendors have now seen what is possible when companies are forced to innovate.
Old excuses have been wiped away. Time and time again we have seen the resilience, ingenuity, and adaptability of our colleagues and our businesses. We have never been in a better position to reimagine the future.
The challenge now lies in closing that gap between aspiration and reality. Working with technology providers, digital consultants, and the best creative and strategic minds to maximise IT investments and equip your workforce to meet new demands and exceed new expectations.
Creating new markets and new businesses to disrupt the basis of competition
Expansion into adjacent areas to create new sources of growth
Incremental developments that improve legacy business
For maximum impact, you must strive to nurture a portfolio of innovative projects across all three spheres, to drive transformation while balancing risk and reward.
"The value of an idea lies in the using of it."
—Thomas Edison, Inventor
We know you recognise the value of innovation. Like many businesses, you are continually pursuing change in core areas. You likely offer some digital services and have moved parts of your business infrastructure to the cloud.
So what’s stopping you from driving more disruptive business models and reaping the potential rewards?
The inconvenient truth is most businesses stick to what they know. They are great at delivering their core functions right now, but not as comfortable embracing change and delivering on the ideas of the future.
Across industries, the average distribution of investment looks like this:
Only 20% of companies are fully prepared to reap the benefits of innovation. They may not understand the full potential of their technology investment. They may lack the capability or expertise to drive innovation to the next level. Or they may be reluctant to leave their comfort zone—improving the business they know rather than stepping into the unknown.
It is not uncommon for organisations to find themselves in this position, and this is often reflected in their approach to strategic IT investments. While many have invested in critical cloud platforms, they are using these platforms to improve how they run their current business applications—often making them more scalable and reliable. However, many have not looked beyond these sustaining improvements to tap into the more significant potential innate in these cloud platforms with more advanced capabilities such as AI, blockchain, native apps, and IoT.
If you are not innovating on top of your technology stack, you are not maximising your IT investment. You are standing still. And for every business that stands still, a competitor is leaping ahead. Publicis Sapient and Microsoft can make sure you’re the one taking that leap.
Publicis Sapient and Microsoft worked together to develop FacePass for Miral, Abu Dhabi’s leading curator of magnetic experiences. This cutting-edge technology takes Yas Island a step closer to its transformational goal of becoming a fully contactless destination.
Much more than ‘wow’ factor, FacePass represents truly disruptive innovation. It is the future for all consumer-facing businesses. Not only does it save time and provide unrivalled convenience, it enhances guest safety and wellbeing through touchless interaction, ensuring world-class safety measures and incredible customer experience.
Services:
“Our global strategic alliance with Microsoft brings together leading-edge cloud technologies with specialist digital-first consulting services to help our clients thrive amid fast-changing market conditions. Our team of industry experts and consultants has significant experience across all industry verticals.”
—John Weston, Senior Vice President, Global Microsoft Practice, Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient and Microsoft are ideally positioned to meet the twin demands of rapid tech innovation and increasing customer expectations. Combining our vast experience, technology capabilities, and business acumen, we can help you break free of the status quo and discover the art of the possible.
Publicis Sapient brings unique startup thinking and expertise in digital business strategy, consulting, customer experience, marketing modernisation, data, and digital transformation. Microsoft offers an industry-leading digital ecosystem encompassing cloud, AI, and enterprise solutions. Together we can deliver substantial value to your business.
We’ll help you:
"The best way to predict your future is to create it."
—Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States
If you’re running Azure, Dynamics, or Office 365 as standalone applications, using Teams solely as a meeting tool, or are yet to explore advanced services such as AI and Blockchain, you’re missing a huge opportunity.
By exploring new use cases and the added possibilities of your existing stack, you will realise the full potential of your suite—maximising your investments and driving truly transformational innovation across your enterprise.
Complementing your Microsoft environment with bespoke applications is a proven path to accelerate your innovation aspirations. Publicis Sapient and Microsoft can support this exploration with expertise across business, technology, and user experience.
The possibilities and use cases are endless. When you embrace all three spheres of innovation with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft, you can:
As part of our own transformation, Publicis Sapient set out to become an innovative platform for our clients. But to become a platform for others, we had to build one of our own.
Together with Microsoft, we designed and built a world-leading professional assistant—combining Microsoft technologies, AI, social networking, voice recognition, predictive analytics, and Machine Learning.
Our creation, Marcel, spots trends, analyses data, and highlights opportunities in radical new ways. Helping 80,000 people across 130 countries to connect, create, and collaborate.
Innovation does not stand still. And neither can your business. With the pace of transformation getting faster every day, change is inevitable. Those who resist will remain in the chasing pack—or worse, cease to exist.
Invest three hours of your time—and let us show you how to stay one step ahead. Through our highly immersive workshops, we introduce the principles that drive innovation and work with your teams to envision how they can be applied to your business.
Together, we'll explore:
Book your innovation acceleration workshop today: