Helping Employees to be Digital Transformers – the Olympus.connect Case

Executives across a range of industries are developing strategies to digitally transform their organizations. While much attention has been dedicated to the digitalization of products and services, understanding how to build digital capabilities within a company is less well explored. In this paper, we propose that such inward-facing digital transformations critically depend not primarily on the identification and implementation of innovative digital technologies, but on helping employees to leverage these technologies to be more innovative in their work. To identify what it takes to involve employees as digital transformers, we explore the Olympus.connect case where a new communication and collaboration technology was implemented to spark digitally-enabled workplace and process innovations. Based on our analysis of this project, we propose a set of four lessons learned that support executives in helping their employees co-create digital transformation by involving these employees as peripheral innovators.