When life gives you lemons you make a lemonade. When life gives you digitalisation experience you make it work in your favour. The reason is somehow obvious: with the business scene becoming more saturated than ever, the availability of technology and its scope is what gives the industries the competitive advantage. The next big step? To ensure the companies have the necessary playground or events to try out these technologies.
The new mindset
Working with many industries over the past few years, the Latvian IT Cluster have seen an early, yet interesting revelation in the mindset of technology demand. The question is not whether the industries want to use digital solutions in their business. Because they do. The question is whether there are digital solutions which can actually solve their specific business challenges. This is where our playground comes in – digi-meetups, industry hackathons, digitalisation workshops and the very recent couch experts’ visits, which are created and tested to bring IT and other industries together, give companies hands-on practical experience on business challenges and solutions and foster new partnerships.
Collaboration over sales process
Rather than promoting and selling digital solutions, our events focus on building collaborations, communication, comprehension and trust between the industries. All the companies joining events become partners and team members who step out of their comfort zone, share the knowledge and look for solutions as a team. It leads to the “giving back to community” concept where better and stronger relationships are built through common goals, mutual understanding and commitment.
The control over decision making
The cross-industry collaboration relates on external knowledge and different approaches on how to operate the product, transformation process or business, however, the crucial part is the decision making – what changes to make, what products to create and implement. The policy of our events is that the control over the decisions stays in the hands of the industry company. The mentors who include business experts, industry professionals and entrepreneurs, and who come in to help the companies are there to ignite the ideas and directions, but it is up to the company to accept or decline these suggestions. Thus, they gain the courage to make the changes, take the responsibility for the changes, facilitate the changes and become a business that is more competitive, efficient and productive – the companies themselves become advocates of change.
