An Educational Approach for Present and Future of Digital Transformation in Portuguese Organizations

The current technological evolution allows us to easily and quickly obtain more information, computing capacity, communication and connectivity, in addition to allowing new forms of collaboration between disperse networks of diversified actors. This new reality not only offers enormous potential for innovation and enhanced performance for organizations but also, extends beyond the classic boundaries to affect individuals, other organizations and society in general. At the same time, this reality makes the ability of organizations to uphold their competitive advantage more challenging, since the control of the elements of their operating environment decreases drastically as they increasingly control the elements of the same environment. This is how the digital transformation of organizations becomes unavoidable, because otherwise they tend to disappear. In this context, it is necessary to infer our students’ methods for researching, identifying and taking solutions about if organizations in Portugal are already living the aforementioned digital transformation or if they are aware of the need to adapt to this new reality. The main goal of this research formatted as educational approach, is to evaluate and compare the current state of digital adoption in terms of the preparation according to the prevailing technological categories (pillars and innovation accelerators), as well as future priorities of organizations in the implementation of digital transformation in Portuguese organizations. To evaluate such objectives, a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach was used to reinforce the research and decision-making skills of undergraduate business students. Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that organizations are aware of the need to accommodate the digital transformation not to fail and disappearing. However, it is not possible to conclude which strategy is to be adopted by the organizations, and how such a strategy will affect the organization as a whole, in particular as in respect of its business model.

Gamified Software to Support the Design of Business Innovation

Business innovation is a process that requires creativity, and benefits from extensive collaboration. Currently, computational support in creativity processes is low, but modern techniques would allow these processes to be sped up. In this context, we provide such a computational support with software for business innovation design that uses computational creativity techniques. Furthermore, the software enables a gamified process to increase user engagement and collaboration, which mimics evolutionary methods, relying on a voting mechanism. The software includes a business innovation ontology representing the domain knowledge that is used to generate and select a set of diverse preliminary representations of business ideas. Indeed, the most promising for novelty and potential impact are identified to ignite a business innovation game where team members collaborate to elaborate new innovation ideas based on those inputs until convergence to a shortlist of business model proposals. The main features of the approach are illustrated by means of a running example concerning innovative services for smart cities.