Diversify your portfolio are wise words financial advisers commonly dispense to investors. It’s also a good idea for digitally transforming businesses to diversify their goals. They can’t afford to run in place while competitors design disruptive business models.

A company today should keep three goal horizons in sight at all times, according to Steven Hill (pictured), global head of innovation at KPMG LLP. The first goal is the short-term easy bets keeping bacon on the table.

“But you also can’t be strategically stupid and build yourself into an alleyway or corner because you’re too short-term,” Hill said. The next goal involves middle-term investments. And the third horizon goal is where companies need to think hard about innovation; how are they going to stay relevant among disruptors down the line?

This is where new business models or services that actually change industries are born. They are likely to be based on “intangibles” like data, according to Hill.

Hill spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed how companies innovate in real life and the market shift toward intangibles. (* Disclosure below.)

Customer-data derby

Horizon-three investments in intangibles will be smaller in number, but companies who nurture them could earn untold dividends, according to Hill.

“Today, the top five companies in terms of net worth all fundamentally rely on intangibles for their worth,” Hill said. “I would argue that notion of intangibles — particularly data — will drive a lot of very transformative types of investments for organizations going forward.” 

Competitive advantage comes down to who knows customers better. Data is about the surest route a company has into customers’ minds. It’s how Amazon.com Inc. grew its many tentacles.

“They started selling books, and they leveraged customer behavior data to move into other spaces. And this is kind of the intangible dynamic,” Hill stated. 

Companies must not let their data-driven, intangible initiatives languish in some ivory tower. They need to be operationalized and iteratively tested.

Build connections between the production engine and the innovation engine, Hill advised.

“It should be very seamless. Everyone likes to say that word, but in reality seamless is heavy architecture. You’ve got to build that collaboration into your model of how you innovate,” Hill concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: KPMG LLP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither KPMG nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE