{"id":1655,"date":"2022-10-03T06:04:36","date_gmt":"2022-10-02T22:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitspark.co\/blog\/digit-spark-apec-sme-monitor-vol32\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T06:23:54","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T22:23:54","slug":"digit-spark-apec-sme-monitor-vol32","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/digitspark.co\/en\/blog\/digit-spark-apec-sme-monitor-vol32\/","title":{"rendered":"[APEC SME Trends Monitoring] Digit Spark: Driving Digital Innovation and Fostering Resilient Operations from a Marketing Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Taiwanese SMEs, in addition to promoting digital development, diversifying and innovating in marketing to stay in close contact with the market is also one of the keys to sustainable growth.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2022, Digit Spark Group was honored to be invited by the APEC SME Crisis Management Center to publish our views on data applications in\u00a0the 32nd issue of\u00a0<\/span>the APEC SME Trends Monitoring Report .<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(The following content is from the APEC SME Trends Monitoring Report, written by Digit Spark Marketing and Public Relations Department)<\/p>\n

Survival rules for technology companies:<\/span>
\nDrive digital innovation with a marketing perspective and cultivate resilient operations.<\/span><\/h1>\n

“In any industry, even companies and organizations that are not oriented towards selling products or marketing for profit (such as administrative corporations and charitable foundations) should move towards digital innovation.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Digital innovation for businesses is not just a response to the pandemic era. Even without the sudden global upheaval of 2020, human behavior patterns and business operation models have long been different due to the rapid growth of networking, AI intelligence, and algorithms. Furthermore, the factors that determine the life and death of businesses, such as the natural environment, global political and economic changes, and the variability of market competition, will only change faster and more frequently.<\/span><\/p>\n

How can we integrate AI technology into our own corporate strengths and leverage it for growth, becoming symbiotic partners in mutual benefit and prosperity, rather than limiting our understanding of AI technology to algorithms pushing advertisements on mobile phones? Beyond simply using tools, market acumen and digitally-driven decision-making are the core of corporate development. In the past, Digti Spark Group has guided nearly a thousand SMEs in their digital and data transformation. We’ve observed that while most SMEs can quickly learn how to use digital tools to boost sales and membership operations, there’s a gap between their performance and internal management, such as operational policies and decision-making, leading to insufficient responsiveness when facing changing environmental trends.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Digitalization” is not the same as “digital innovation”.<\/span><\/h2>\n

The purpose of “corporate innovation” is to maintain viability. It’s important to clarify here that digital innovation differs from the “digitalization” that companies have traditionally pursued. In the past, companies understood digitalization simply as: “Building an official website and social media presence to showcase company and brand information online and connect with others through the internet.” This was merely one aspect of incorporating digital tools into a company’s marketing strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand,\u00a0<\/span>“digital innovation” is a long-term process of comprehensive technological and conceptual reform<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0; it combines data technology with operational strategies to build an enterprise with\u00a0<\/span>adaptability and resilience<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0, capable of continuously facing unknown challenges, and to provide comprehensive technology support in all aspects such as “enterprise operation, internal cooperation methods, short, medium and long-term goal planning, risk management, sales models, and interaction with consumers”.<\/span><\/p>\n

A common problem faced by industries in Taiwan and globally is the digital divide among different sectors and companies, which directly impacts their digital resilience. Companies that already possess digital resilience have a high level of digital innovation and demonstrate a certain level of competence in “damage management under impact,” “recovery and growth after impact,” and “self-destructive and growth resilience,” thus resulting in a high survival rate.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to a survey conducted by\u00a0<\/span>the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of 411 senior managers from various industries worldwide, only 29% believe their companies possess a sufficient level of viability. Furthermore, according to an industry sector survey, 57% of entertainment industry leaders and 44% of retail industry leaders believe they are sufficiently viable, compared to only 15% of healthcare leaders and 20% of financial services leaders. Even in daily life, we can clearly perceive a significant disparity in digital resilience between different companies and industries. I believe that regardless of their industry or the companies they face, businesses should accelerate their digital innovation to collectively foster a robust and digitally resilient economic cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n

Integrating Agile Marketing into Operations to Ensure Digital Resilience<\/span><\/h2>\n

Established, large companies, or those that rely on face-to-face work, may find it slower and more difficult to develop digital innovation. Business managers can learn from startups and young, small companies. While smaller and less resource-rich, these businesses possess considerable flexibility, enabling them to quickly change goals and adjust strategies. In fact, we’ve seen large global conglomerates like Toshiba, Dell, IBM, and GE increasingly splitting into smaller companies to focus on their core strengths. For example, GE spun off its healthcare and energy divisions, with the parent company now focusing solely on its aero-engine division. This avoids the pitfalls of large conglomerates trying to compensate for weaknesses with dispersed resources and inefficient decision-making, which can hinder a company’s innovative resilience.<\/span><\/p>\n

For larger companies, we don’t necessarily need to split into multiple smaller companies, but each team within the company should maintain its independence and flexibility. A team is a small group of people with multiple skills who can collaborate quickly, enough to fully focus on its core business; it can lock onto goals and adjust strategies at any time without being constrained by other factors within the organization. At the same time, it can adapt to broader trends, introduce new technological tools, conduct small-scale, rapid application experiments, analyze the results, and continuously create new ways of collaboration and profit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, “big data analytics” and “data visualization” are current trends in the IT industry and are now widely used in marketing, providing objective and comprehensive statistical data analysis for product sales, advertising campaign planning, and new product development. With the trend towards remote work, both can bring high efficiency and cross-distance support to enterprises in management, collaboration, and risk assessment; and through an objective data analysis perspective, they avoid the blind spots of human thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his book\u00a0<\/span>*Marketing 5.0*<\/span><\/a>\u00a0, marketing guru Philip Kotler and his team of authors introduced the concept of “Agile Marketing.” Agile Marketing emphasizes the technological growth of business operations, aligning with the pursuit of digital innovation. We can apply this concept to the operational level. For example, Digti Spark uses AI robots to help businesses analyze and compare the effectiveness of advertising channels and the variables that influence those effectiveness, generating visual charts and other tools to accelerate human decision-making. It also uses data to identify projects with excessively high conversion costs that are not yet suitable for further development.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here are three points we believe can be used to apply the concepts of\u00a0<\/span>Agile Marketing<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0to business operations:<\/span><\/p>\n

[Facilities and corresponding technical personnel for businesses operated primarily by digital technology]<\/span><\/h3>\n

Ultimately, the most crucial factor in digital innovation is people, or\u00a0<\/span>the organization itself<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0. Besides ensuring all employees are proficient in digital tools, organizations should cultivate a number of new digital talents, such as data scientists, user experience designers, and IT architects. Enterprises should adopt and utilize future-proof hardware and software, storage space, IT technologies, digital knowledge, and data analytics as a foundation to further develop capabilities such as robotic collaboration, algorithmic analysis, and virtual-physical integration.<\/span><\/p>\n

[The entire organization should become familiar with remote collaboration capabilities and make it a regular work habit.]<\/span><\/h3>\n

The “digitalized customer experience” concept proposed in Agile Marketing advocates for establishing touchpoints through digital tools in customer development, sales customer service, delivery, and membership management, enabling employees in different processes to remotely contact, track, and collaborate. We translate this concept into organizational guidelines, implementing\u00a0<\/span>“digitalized work experience”<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0:<\/span><\/p>\n