About CCE Institute Pichhore in Vishwanath nivas hanuman bag pichhore, Pichhore

Today, the challenge has become: what will business leaders do with their digital advantage?

It’s not a trivial question. Becoming a digital business is a massive transformation. Two years ago, the Accenture Technology Vision forecasted the pervasive need for every business to become a digital business. We saw technology begin to take its place as a primary driver of profitability and market differentiation in every industry.

Last year at Accenture, we began to see the industry leaders embrace this transformation and begin to reimagine their businesses for the digital era. The 2014 Accenture Technology Vision declared that “Big Is the Next Big Thing.” We saw that the next logical step for large and often long-established companies was to start using technology not just as a way to improve their own internal processes, but also as a driving force for how they grow. We predicted that these new “digerati,” with their deep resources, huge scale, and process discipline, were about to rewrite much of the digital playbook.

Today, we see pioneering enterprises beginning to do just that—but they are doing far more than just flexing their digital muscles. They are fundamentally changing the way they look at themselves; leading enterprises are quickly mastering the shift from “me” to “we.” They are stretching their boundaries by tapping into a broad array of other digital businesses, digital customers, and even digital devices at the edge of their networks. Leaders eager to drive change are using this broader digital ecosystem to place bets on a grand scale. These forward-thinking companies are looking to shape entire markets and change the way we work and live.

Succeeding in the “We Economy”

The digital era not only makes big bets possible but increasingly necessary. The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a force that is driving innovation and new opportunities by bringing every object, consumer, and activity into the digital realm. At the same time, leading businesses are making similar changes within their enterprises by digitizing every employee, process, product, and service. This year, we conducted our first Technology Vision survey, polling more than 2,000 business and technology executives across nine countries and 10 industries, in order to understand key technology challenges as well as priority investments. Our survey revealed that 62 percent are investing in digital technologies, and 35 percent are comprehensively investing in digital as part of their overall business strategy.

Taken in aggregate, enterprises find themselves connected to a digital fabric that has the potential to touch all aspects of their business, their customer relationships, and the world around them. Already, this fabric has provided enterprises with an ability to connect and scale up in unprecedented ways. Companies routinely deal with hundreds of business processes, thousands of employees, and millions of consumers. Many large companies are at a scale where they touch billions of lives.

More and more, however, companies are beginning to see that these connections are not just limited to their employees and customers. They also have the potential to tie themselves into a global network of businesses, individuals, and things from every industry around the world.

This grand network of connections and its transformational power introduce a new era in the digital age—the age of “digital ecosystems.”

Pioneering companies have already realized the implications of tapping into a digital ecosystem. They see that in such digitally driven, hyper-connected times, they have the capacity for action beyond transforming themselves into digital businesses.

In our survey, 81 percent believe that in the future, industry boundaries will dramatically blur as platforms reshape industries into interconnected ecosystems. Huge efficiencies can and will be gained as businesses continue to master digital technologies internally. Visionary companies, however, are recognizing that as every business becomes a digital business, together they can effect change on a much bigger stage. Working together, they can shape experiences—and outcomes—in ways never before possible.

This is highlighted best in the rapidly growing Industrial Internet of Things. Here, companies are using these connections to offer new services, reshape experiences, and enter new markets by creating digital ecosystems. Home Depot, for example, is looking to shape the way people live through an emerging connected home market. The company is working with manufacturers to ensure all of the connected home products it sells are compatible with the Wink connected home system. In doing so, Home Depot is creating its own connected home ecosystem, with a wide range of services that are easy to install.

Philips is taking a similar approach. No longer is their healthcare practice just a producer of medical equipment; Philips is teaming up with Salesforce to build a platform that they believe will reshape and optimize the way healthcare is delivered. The envisioned platform will create an ecosystem of developers building healthcare applications to enable collaboration and workflow between doctors and patients across the entire spectrum of care, from self-care and prevention to diagnosis and treatment through recovery and wellness. By integrating data from multiple sources worldwide, Philips sees an enormous opportunity to improve patient health by enhancing the decision-making capability of medical professionals while increasing the active engagement of patients in their own treatment. The ecosystem Philips orchestrates to achieve these improved outcomes is vast: electronic medical records, diagnostic and treatment information obtained through Philips’ imaging equipment, monitoring equipment, and personal devices and technologies like Apple’s HealthKit.

Fiat is looking toward connected cars as the next growth opportunity within the automotive industry. Partnering with leading edge companies in navigation systems, media, social media and entertainment sectors, Fiat is creating its own Uconnect platform. It will be integrated with the Fiat-Chrysler Group’s vehicles to provide drivers with communication, entertainment, and navigation features that can help drivers stay focused on driving.

Home Depot, Philips, Fiat, and many other companies are making big bets on huge opportunities that have the potential to bring about change on a global scale. By tapping into digital ecosystems, these companies have the ability to realize ambitions that transcend any single business or any one industry.

These pioneering businesses see great potential to make a difference—and to make a profit—by operating as ecosystems, not just as individual corporate entities. By mastering the shift from “me” to “we,” these leading enterprises are shaping a new economy—the “we economy.”

By tapping into the digital ecosystem, ordinary businesses can tackle challenges that were previously well beyond their scope. They can realize an opportunity to help design and create smart mega-cities of the future, radically rebuild centuries-old modes of transportation, or raise the quality of healthcare by addressing it holistically across many industries, from hospitals to insurance to apparel. These are the types of “epic” transformations that excite customers, inspire employees, galvanize long-term suppliers— and enable investors to reap big rewards.

The new power brokers will place themselves at the center of these digital ecosystems and quickly master new digital relationships with their customers, end users, suppliers, alliance partners, developers, data sources, makers of smart devices, and specialty talent sources. All will share the same goal: to grow new markets and in turn their individual businesses.

None of this will be easy, but the effort has the potential for tremendous rewards. The new age of the digital ecosystem isn’t only about changing an individual company; it’s about shaping entire markets. Each enterprise will determine its own fortunes—and that’s an opportunity that no company will want to miss.