• Preparation – Check digital readiness
  The first step is to assess your company’s digital readiness. Our questionnaire will help you
• Inspiration – Provide stimuli
  Our experts give short presentations to introduce you to trends and topics from the digital world. The main focus areas will depend on the results of your digital readiness profile
• Creativity – Come up with ideas
  Start collecting ideas to drive your project forward. In just a few hours, you can obtain and classify up to 100 ideas relating to your digital business model.
• Focus – Select ideas
  Now the ideas need to be divided into appropriate groups and prioritised. The best idea will be put into more concrete terms in order to give it form and substance
• Result – Develop a prototype
  The Immersion Session concludes with a paper prototype” or a possible “customer journey”. You can start implementation the very next day thanks to this tangible result

What’s special about an immersion session?
Immersion sessions are where we initiate dialogue, create a framework, reduce the complexity, firm up expectations, provide stimulus and help our clients tread the right path courageously. Our clients can implement the result of their immersion session step by step on their own, or with the help of our experienced experts. This way we ensure that digital initiatives don’t get holed up in silos or blocked by people who aren’t involved.

Which techniques and methodologies do you use?
We have a broad range to choose from depending on the situation and the team set-up. We use kick-off speeches, design thinking, lean start-up, co-creation or investor pitches where groups of participants have to convince the others of their ideas. Our methods are practical and have proven their worth with many different clients, from Swiss family companies to global corporations.

Sounds like hard work.
It is hard work. Immersion sessions produce outstanding performances. We function as high-performing teams. The groups taking part span different people with responsibility and stakeholders of the company. This includes decision-makers and representatives of disciplines such as the business, marketing, IT, product development, and so on. In our workshops, we take organisations out of their daily business and their comfort zone. For two days, they can devote themselves entirely to their digital transformation.

What do you understand by high-performing?
In digitisation, too, people often only look at things from one angle. In our immersion sessions, we bring all the different perspectives together: the business, the customer experience, and the technology. This way we can draw together different ideas and inspiration from different angles. We tend to talk in terms of the power of perspectives rather than “high-performing”. Approaching a digital project on a multidisciplinary basis enables you to draw a complete, rounded picture and quickly move on to implementation.

When do companies come to the Experience Center?
Our clients are at different stages of transformation. Some are right at the beginning of the journey and don’t know what digitisation means for them. They’ve read about it, gone to the odd presentation and had discussions about it. We help these clients be clear about what the concept means and come up with initial ideas and lighthouse projects that will illuminate their digital path and the potential pitfalls.

The second group consists of clients that are right in the midst of digital transformation, but haven’t yet coordinated efforts across the organisation. In many cases the first digital projects have been delivered by the IT, HR or marketing department. We give these companies a digital fitness test. We make sure they’re on the right track and are building on their strengths.

The third group consists of clients who have mastered the first wave of digitisation. We help these companies dive deeper into specific areas, for example artificial intelligence or blockchain. We help them demarcate customer segments for the desired areas of focus and develop new business models.

Which are the typical hurdles encountered by your clients in the process of digital transformation?
Digital transformation fails if it isn’t supported by top management or the boss. Another problem lies in a tendency to underestimate the complexity involved. Some clients aren’t able to work on strategy, data use, prototypes and market launch at the same time and respond flexibly to feedback from the marketplace. Digitisation isn’t a purely technological issue in any case. We talk of business-to-people. It’s about customers and staff, their desires and emotions.

And then there are customers who want too much at once. When it comes to digital transformation, you should start with small steps and trigger a snowball effect in terms of acceptance and funding. Digital projects grow exponentially. In the lower, flat part of the curve it’s important not to lose your nerve, because the usual key performance indicators usually don’t mean anything. If you want to digitise successfully you need a lot of staying power and the right measurement systems.

Which alternatives do clients have to digital transformation?
Honestly? None. Sooner or later digital transformation will hit every company in every industry. It might take a bit longer in areas such as healthcare where trust is heavily dependent on interpersonal factors. On the other hand, the same applies to the digital as to the analogue world: an idea has to come onto the market at the right time.

Which team and job descriptions are behind the Experience Center?
On the one hand, we have “young guns” working for us who are specialised in innovation, Lean [1], UX [2] and Design Thinking, and clearly belong to our “creative block”. We also employ software developers, scrum masters [3] and so-called product owners for the delivery of complex solutions. They’re supported by data analysts and seasoned cybersecurity experts from PwC Digital Services. Many of these people have an academic or scientific background or started out in software development and industry. Our core team is pretty young. Depending on the client and the task at hand, we also add experts from the various value creation disciplines and industries within PwC.

[1] Reducing waste, paring back the methodology and phylosophy, and coming up with a iterativ, step-by-step approach to develop products and services customers love. 

[2] User experience: Making sure that the user experience and the interaction between people and machines are intuitive and self-explanatory.

[3] The person who makes sure that people stick to the agile development process. The scrum master supports teams and takes care of any potential obstacles.

How does the Experience Center differ from other digital creativity labs?
As I’ve described, we take a holistic approach from strategy to implementation, and, if desired, can provide everything on a one-stop basis. This way we make sure we have the big picture and reduce coordination losses. Our services are delivered with the quality standards people expect from PwC. Many providers only cover a single step in the process, for example strategy, creation or development, and clients have to take care of the rest themselves. We offer concrete results that make us part of the implementation – and the client’s success.

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