Fujitsu's Innovation Framework in the Transport Sector: 'From Zero to Hero'

Published on October 15, 2020 in Transport • Innovation

It is Year 2020 and virtually every business is talking about digital transformation being an essential part in their current and future strategy for their survival in a competitive market landscape.

This challenge has become more thought-provoking, as business need to consider the social, political and geo-economical aspects, while executing any digital transformation initiatives; this is better known as “Doing the Right Thing “. The continued uncertainty and tumultuous transformation for many companies and industries brings a unique set of challenges for CIOs and IT leaders striving to remain customer-obsessed.

These points are mentioned frequently across boardrooms:

We all know that we need to transform the business.
We have to transform to be able to survive.
We have to make sure we are doing the right thing for our colleagues, the communities and society while transforming.
We need to maintain the existing service and business as usual during the transformation.
We all agree on these points, but the question is where do we start.

Now, here is the good news – every obstacle in a path becomes a path itself and every challenge creates an opportunity to improve the conditions we live in. It is in our human nature that we need to shape the world around us in order to excel. This creates innovation and new creative ideas that help in any digital transformation for any business.

My view, which is shared by many people within my network and across the industry, is that the IT market has become too complex. There are many options that contribute to this confusion, which delays starting any digital transformation initiatives. We have to do less talking and more execution; this can be achieved by breaking down large transformation programmes into small activities to tackle through a simple and agile innovation engine.

This has helped me and many of our customers manage the complexity using a very streamlined framework ‘Fujitsu NOVO’ to go from ‘Zero to Hero’ in a short space of time.

The Challenge

Let me share a recent engagement with a particular customer:

One of our long serving customer in the transport sector turned to Fujitsu as one of their trusted partners to address a high-risk business problem, which could affect their employees, communities and society we live within. The business challenge that Fujitsu has been nominated to solve is about how to proactively monitor, prevent and mitigate air pollution on all customer’s sites in order to minimise the impact to the communities it serves. In addition to the wellbeing element to this challenge, any solution would need to comply with the United Kingdom Government legislations and regulations around construction and environment management to avoid expensive fines and eliminate the risk of work stoppage due to unacceptable dust particle levels.

Through Fujitsu’s Innovation Framework, which consists of four phases, Challenge, Focus, Develop and Validate, we were able to better understand the business challenge and bring together internal, as well as external capabilities via the partner eco-system to help solve this challenge.

Using Fujitsu’s Human Centric Experience Design (HXD) approach to co-creation and ideation platforms as tools within Fujitsu Innovation Framework, we were able to galvanise the required industry subject matter experts from Fujitsu capability, the wider partner ecosystem and academia in order to explore and identify possible solution for this challenge. This allowed us to harness the power of collaboration and work closely with the customer to deliver unique digital transformation by driving ideation through a virtual workshop and a trusted methodology.

Virtual workshop

The virtual workshop meant much more than just another co-creating workshop. There were plenty of creative ideas produced by the attendee teams on how to address the business challenge; the introductory ‘Art of the possible’ overview covered some disruptive ideas and trends in this space and encouraged the participants to be visionary and creative, while aligning to the customer’s strategy, vision and values.

At the ideation phase, the teams generated insights around inclusive and valuable solutions by making use of different personas and assessing their key characteristics, wants and needs. The digital workshop served a wider scope; that of demonstrating Fujitsu’s capabilities on the latest technology trends and enabling a real collaboration with one of their strategic partners based on disruptive innovation.

By aligning to the customer innovation strategy, we were able to focus on real, tangible and measurable outcomes that fed into the solution workshop. As a trusted partner, Fujitsu led by providing thought-leadership, demonstrating capability on emerging technologies, bringing expertise from the wider ecosystem and structuring the right way to innovation through Fujitsu’s Innovation Framework.

The amazing feedback that we received from the customers proves that Fujitsu is a top-class DX partner and the combination of Fujitsu’s Innovation Framework and Co-creation approach can spearhead and further accelerate the development of new initiatives.

Summary

Lately, the enterprise market has undergone rapid and drastic changes with advances in digital technology, increasing demand for systems that can respond quickly and flexibly to support customers’ needs in a variety of business contexts. As a result, a growing need is emerging for large-scale Agile development for large and complex enterprise systems in various industries. Addressing these challenges does not have to be complex as I demonstrated.

It was a great experience and a pleasure being part of this journey with our customer and we look forward to solving more of our customer business challenges through meaningful innovation.