The Core Digital Competencies Development of Digital Innovation You Can’t Ignore  

In today’s world of ever-accelerating innovation, nimble challengers spring up and disrupt businesses overnight. Keeping pace with the competition and ensuring long-term market relevance can be a daunting task. The one certain in a thick of uncertainty is that the decision to harness the power of digital to drive business results and ensure long-term market relevance is no longer a question of if, but a question of how. 

The current development of civilization and the process of transition to the digital economy is irreversible. In order to transform a company and allow new channels to generate real value, it needs to rethink its actions integrating digital tools into its core. The intensive adoption of information and communication technologies has created digital transformation. The process of digital transformation begins with a business evaluation strategy in a scenario dominated by uncertainties that require a focus on the challenges ahead.  

The difference between organisations that are ready for the digital transformation is the organisation’s approach to innovation. Digitally mature organisations are innovating differently because it is driven by the people with abilities and skills that allow their organisations to rethink the strategies.  

Organisations are perceiving new concepts about skills development as strategic management tools to cope with the current business environment. Although the word skill may suggest the concept is the same as competencies, they are different. Skills, or expertise, are the ability to do something well while competencies are a complex bundle of skills, accumulated knowledge that employees exercise through the organizational process that enables them to coordinate activities and make use of their assets. Aligned with the concept of digital competencies, there is a list of digital roles that digital innovation has created within a company or the emergence of disruptive technologies.  

 Figure 1: Building a Digital Workforce by Gartner Insights 

However, the talent gap is not limited to technical skills as organisations are also struggling to find and hire employees with competencies who can help build a better digital experience in this new digital era. The relevance of the organisations’ development capability also requires fostering the employees’ self-organisation for learning as well as for working terms to implement new organisational forms, leadership modes, and management systems. 

Although digital innovation is a buzzword that translates the path of transformation to embrace the emerging digital technologies into the business processes, products, services and customer experiences, the technology by itself is not going to provide the solution.  

The knowledge on when and how to launch initiatives or the idea that new digital skills are needed is still unclear for many organisations.  In addition, the importance of digital competencies is highlighted by the pandemic during which have forced people to stay home and work digitally while many companies had to change their business processes or even business models to survive this global crisis. Organisations with higher levels of digital maturity and with more developed digital competencies have been better prepared to quickly respond to this crisis.