Management of Digital Transformation (363-0421-00L)

Content & Learning Goals

We start with perhaps the most important question: How does digitalization change my industry, i.e., customers, products, customer touch points, value chains, business processes. To tackle this question, we will take a look at current developments in the media, health care, automotive, insurance and machine tool industry. We study the essence of digital business model patterns such as freemium, subscription models, X-as-a-service models, and digital platforms, and finally carve out basic insights and driving forces from selected theories in the fields of transaction costs, network economics and technology management.
We then continue with elaborating on the question: How can I act upon this change? How can we understand the newly forming playing fields and how can we position ourselves uniquely on a selected playing field? We look at the process of business model innovation and study different routes to test and implement new business models – from DIY to M&A.

Moving from the strategic to the organizational level, we illuminate the next most important question: How can we renew and build our digital assets? How can we organize ourselves to deliver new products, services, and business processes as fast and efficient as possible. We study the concept of ambidexterity, agile organizations from large project portfolios down to small teams, the special role of end-to-end responsibilities and how to organizationally anchor the key role of data.

Next we cover: How can I ensure adequate cyber security? This is a C-Level question of growing importance. We look at major threads and forms companies can organize themselves to defend their assets and reputation against cyber threads.
Finally, we look at the question: How do I make sure I don't miss out on new relevant technology? How do I bring new technology & ideas into my company efficiently and effectively. We briefly look into organizational means, from outposts to Labs and Corporate Venturing.

Semester Project

The semester project will cover the first two questions. Students from groups of 3 members select a case company from a list provided by the lecture team, analyze the case along the given structure and catalogue of questions und present the results in a pre-structured 3-minute video. In a first part, the video should show in a quantitative and qualitative manner, why and how the digitalization impacts the industry of the case company. In the second part, it compares the old with the new business model along the scheme of Osterwalder/Pigneur. Part 3 finally sports the personal comments of the team on the pros and cons of the observed business model transformation. The evaluation of the video is part of the course grading (30 %). In addition, the videos will be made available to all peer students. Some videos might be featured on the lecture home page.