OREANDA-NEWS. “As predicted by industry watchers, the world of Consulting has experienced a significant disruption over the past few years,” writes Sandy Gopalan. “Enterprises have roped in former consultants for internal strategy groups. At the same time, technology has gone mainstream. Businesses are demanding more comprehensive consulting services and want results, not just reports.” Excerpts:

“In the last few years, many leading industry analysts and thought leaders have dwelt upon these developments, foretelling a phenomenon at work today in most top-tier consulting firms, where erstwhile strategy houses as well as IT services consulting players have moved to the center, holding out an end-to-end proposition spanning strategy through implementation.

As we enter the digital era, digital technologies are upending established business models and spawning unheard of paradigms. ‘Uber-ization’ has taken the management lexicon by storm. Start-ups are in vogue. Digital technology-based innovation is unleashing a wave of disruption ? be it banking, shopping or healthcare.

Consulting as a craft works best for known problems with possible solutions that may have been applied earlier. Innovation requires the ability to look into the future, identify the opportunity and realize it. It calls for a collaborative, prototype-based, iterative approach, which is at the core of design thinking. Design thinking is a rigorous human-centered innovation methodology that looks at a problem through the eyes of the people who experience it, provides actionable insights around unmet needs and untapped opportunities, generates unexpected ideas for changes, and learns by testing rather than guessing.