Michael Wade

Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation

Michael Wade is Professor of Innovation and Strategy and Director of the IMD Global Center for Digital Business Transformation. He also holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. An expert in digital transformation, he has published 10 books and more than 100 case studies as well as articles on topics such as digital business transformation, innovation, strategy, and digital leadership. In 2021, he was elected to the Digital Shapers Hall of Fame by a consortium of Swiss business media and launched the Management under the Microscope podcast, in which he unpacks business myths through conversations with academics and business executives.

Wade helps organizations with the challenges they currently face as they seek to use digital tools and technologies to drive business value. His research shows that 87% of digital transformation programs fail to meet expectations, so his work focuses on identifying the mistakes organizations make when they implement such programs and best practices in execution. What differentiates successful from less successful organizations is how good they are at integrating digital technologies into a broader organizational and cultural transformation, he says. His work also covers ways to improve innovation and creativity, leading effectively in a digital age, and the link between digitalization and ethics.

When it comes to digital transformation, the keyword is ‘transformation’. Digital is an enabler, but it is only a means to an end. The end is always some kind of business performance benefit.

His book Hacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate your Business Transformation, was published in 2021. The book is aimed at helping companies to solve problems related to digital transformation. That same year, he released a book on innovation and creativity called ALIEN Thinking: How to Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life. His 2016 book, Digital Vortex: How Today’s Market Leaders Can Beat Disruptive Competitors at their Own Game, won multiple awards and was a bestseller in several languages.

Wade has also been published in leading journals including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, the Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, and Strategic Management Journal, and is a regular contributor to Fortune Magazine, Forbes, and The Conversation, providing commentary on digital business issues and trends.

At IMD, he founded and directs Leading Digital Business Transformation (LDBT), Europe’s first and largest program for executives on digital, and is director of several other open programs including Digital Execution (DE), Digital Transformation for Boards (DTB), and the recently launched Digital Transformation Sprint (DTS). He has also designed and directed custom programs related to digital strategy and transformation for dozens of organizations across industries and sits on a number of corporate boards as an advisor on digitization and business model disruption.

Before joining IMD in 2010, Wade was Associate Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems in the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. As part of this role, he served as Academic Director of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA Program and Associate Director of the International MBA Program.

Selected publications
Hacking digital: Best practices to implement and accelerate your business transformation
Book
Hacking digital: Best practices to implement and accelerate your business transformation
DigitalOrganizational Transformation
Digital transformation has become commonplace across public and private sector organizations, and yet most struggle to achieve tangible results from it. Many make avoidable mistakes or fall into si...
4 October 2021
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Book
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Strategy
How do people come up with truly original ideas? For the past decade, the authors of this book have studied individuals who have made leaps of creativity-inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneu...
16 March 2021
Article
The building blocks of an AI strategy
Technology ManagementDigital
As the popularity of artificial intelligence waxes and wanes, it feels like we are at a peak. Hardly a day goes by without an organization announcing “a pivot toward AI” or an aspiration to “become...
10 August 2020
Article
Three proactive response strategies to Covid-19 business challenges
Digital
Since the COVID-19 crisis struck, organizations in vulnerable sectors worldwide have seen their revenues drop substantially in a matter of weeks — in some cases, dwindling to almost nothing. Countl...
17 April 2020
Orchestrating transformation: How to deliver winning performance with a connected approach to change
Book
Orchestrating transformation: How to deliver winning performance with a connected approach to change
DigitalDisruptionCompetitiveness
Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents’ value chains, gaining ...
25 February 2019
Digital vortex: How today's market leaders can beat disruptive competitors at their own game
Book
Digital vortex: How today's market leaders can beat disruptive competitors at their own game
DigitalDisruptionCompetitiveness
Digital disruption sounds like another business buzzword - until it happens to your company. Seemingly out of nowhere, startups and other tech-savvy disruptors attack. Your customers bolt for the d...
21 June 2016
Academic publications
Article
“So what if ChatGPT wrote it?”: Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy
DigitalTechnology Management
Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contex...
1 August 2023
Article
Climate change and COP26: Are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? An editorial reflection and call to action
SustainabilityDigital
The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1...
1 April 2022
Hacking digital: Best practices to implement and accelerate your business transformation
Book
Hacking digital: Best practices to implement and accelerate your business transformation
DigitalOrganizational Transformation
Digital transformation has become commonplace across public and private sector organizations, and yet most struggle to achieve tangible results from it. Many make avoidable mistakes or fall into si...
4 October 2021
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Book
ALIEN thinking: The unconventional path to breakthrough ideas
Strategy
How do people come up with truly original ideas? For the past decade, the authors of this book have studied individuals who have made leaps of creativity-inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneu...
16 March 2021
Case Study
ABN Amro: When culture drives transformation
StrategyDigital
The case describes two transformation journeys for ABN AMRO bank. The first transformation is cultural and the second is digital. It explores the interplay between these two journeys from the persp...
10 December 2020
Article
Covid-19 has accelerated digital transformation, but may have made it harder not easier
DigitalOrganizational Transformation
The impact of Covid-19 on digital transformation is not straightforward. Although many organizations have successfully implemented digital projects to support working from home during the pandemic,...
1 September 2020
Article
Lifting the lid on disruption fever
DisruptionStrategy
This paper provides evidence based quantification of both “actual” disruption of industries as well as a measure of disruption “hype”. The data cover a seven-year period from 2012 to 2018 across 12...
23 July 2020
Case Study
Rabobank: Building digital agility at scale
Strategy
The case illustrates how a financial institution with a conservative culture embraced digital transformation in a highly competitive environment. It focuses on the challenges inherent in moving fro...
2 September 2019
Orchestrating transformation: How to deliver winning performance with a connected approach to change
Book
Orchestrating transformation: How to deliver winning performance with a connected approach to change
DigitalDisruptionCompetitiveness
Company leaders feel the urgency to transform their organizations in the face of digital disruption. New rivals are digitizing whatever can be digitized to attack incumbents’ value chains, gaining ...
25 February 2019
Case Study
McLaren Applied Technologies: Building a disruptive business
Strategy
In 2016, Geoff McGrath, Managing Director of McLaren Applied Technologies (MAT) accepted that the company he was hired to build was at an inflection point. MAT was the smallest of three divisions w...
21 September 2018
Article
Impediments to information systems replacement: A calculus of discontinuance
Technology Management
Relatively little attention has been directed toward examining information system (IS) obsolescence and replacement despite the significant organizational resources invested in such systems. Curren...
7 November 2017
Digital vortex: How today's market leaders can beat disruptive competitors at their own game
Book
Digital vortex: How today's market leaders can beat disruptive competitors at their own game
DigitalDisruptionCompetitiveness
Digital disruption sounds like another business buzzword - until it happens to your company. Seemingly out of nowhere, startups and other tech-savvy disruptors attack. Your customers bolt for the d...
21 June 2016
Article
Linking dimensions of social media use to job performance: The role of social capital
Technology ManagementSocial MediaPerformance Measurement
Organizations are increasingly adopting new technologies, such as social media, that afford employees a repertoire of uses not simply focused on work, but also on socialization and entertainment. K...
1 December 2015
Article
An exploration of multinational enterprise knowledge resources and foreign subsidiary performance
Knowledge ManagementStrategyInvestment
Successful international expansion requires that parent firms simultaneously transfer multiple MNE¦knowledge resources and their foreign subsidiaries effectively absorb and utilize the knowledge. ...
1 January 2013
Article
Firm-level benefits of IT-enabled resources: A conceptual extension and an empirical assessment
Technology Management
While the business value of IT (BVIT) is central to the IS discipline, only recently a possible chain of causation from IT assets (i.e., fungible, widely available, commodity-like, technology-based...
1 December 2011
Article
An exploration of organizational level information systems discontinuance intentions
Technology Management
Limited attention has been directed toward examining post-adoption stages of the information system life cycle. In particular, the final stages of this life cycle have been largely ignored despite ...
1 September 2011
Article
The formation and value of IT-enabled resources: Antecedents and consequences of synergistics relationships
CompetitivenessOrganizational Behavior
This paper informs the literature on the business value of information technology by conceptualizing a path from IT assets--that is, commodity-like or off-the-shelf information technologies--to sus...
1 January 2010
Article
The impact of capabilities and prior investments an online channel commitment and performance
StrategyMarketingDigitalTechnology Management
Attracted by the promise of greater market exposure and increased revenues, firms across a wide variety of industries have undertaken significant investments in online channels. However, while some...
1 May 2007
Article
Does e-business matter to SMEs? A comparison of the financial impacts of Internet business solutions on European and Noth American SMEs
Technology ManagementEntrepreneurshipStrategyDigitalEconomics
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are adopting Internet Business Solutions (IBS) internationally to improve their performance. What is the net impact of these solutions for SMEs? This paper...
1 January 2007
Article
An examination of the trade-off between internal and external IT capabilities
Technology ManagementSupply ChainEconomicsOrganizational DesignDigital
The business case for hiring external IT consultants is compelling. Consultants can represent a rich source of valuable, short-term capabilities. From a resource-based perspective, however, the fun...
1 January 2007
Insight for Executives
Article
Autonomous Vehicles: The bumpy road to self-driving cars
Technology ManagementStrategyInnovation
Professor Mike Wade explains why we're in an "autonomous driving winter", and AI authority Amit Joshi, tells us why the last stage of self-driving development will require a lot more investment
18 May 2023
Building the new business leaders (from the best of the old)
Article
Building the new business leaders (from the best of the old)
DigitalLeadershipTechnology Management
We need a new type of leader for the digital age says Michael Wade, Professor of Innovation and Strategy & Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. However, they should not discard thei...
11 May 2023
Digital Vortex 2023 revealed
Article
Digital Vortex 2023 revealed
StrategyDigitalTechnology ManagementDisruption
IMD’s Global Center for Digital Business Transformation has released its biennial Digital Vortex research highlighting sectors exposed to digital disruption, while confirming that the phenomenon is...
8 May 2023
Moore's Law: Is the search for more processing power holding back tech? 
Article
Moore's Law: Is the search for more processing power holding back tech? 
Technology ManagementInnovation
Michael Wade & Amit Joshi discuss the legacy of Moore's Law, the future of processing power, and the chicken-and-egg question of tech.
4 May 2023
Article
Infusing digital responsibility into your organization
DigitalInnovation
In 2018, Rick Smith, founder and CEO of Axon, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based manufacturer of Taser weapons and body cameras, became concerned that advances in technology were creating new and challe...
28 April 2023
The Metaverse: A place to live, or Silicon Valley pipe dream?
Article
The Metaverse: A place to live, or Silicon Valley pipe dream?
Technology Management
In episode three, Mike and Amit explore how digital spaces are developing and whether companies will need a 'Metaverse strategy' to compete in tomorrow's economy
20 April 2023
Article
9 digital transformation mistakes all organisations make and how to avoid them
InnovationDigital
When it comes to digital transformation, we tend to focus on the success stories. But 87 per cent of digital transformations fail to meet expectations, and that's usually down to a series of common...
31 March 2023
Chat GPT: Hype or reality?
Article
Chat GPT: Hype or reality?
Technology ManagementDigital
New digital services and technologies are released all the time, and every so often, one comes along that hits the viral jackpot. But is ChatGPT here to stay?
23 March 2023
The measurement of digital transformation performance 
Article
The measurement of digital transformation performance 
InnovationDigitalTechnology Management
Michael Wade and Massimo Marcolivio propose four categories of KPIs to measure and track digital transformation.
15 March 2023
Humility in learning
Article
Humility in learning
Digital Disruption Leadership
Can we continue to rely on theories of leadership that were developed many decades ago, long before the widespread adoption of the Internet? What makes a leader successful in highly volatile busine...
11 December 2022
The cultural solution to big tech’s ethics problem
Article
The cultural solution to big tech’s ethics problem
InnovationTechnology ManagementEthicsCorporate Governance
Digital ethics boards can help companies navigate tricky ethical issues as they innovate – provided they are carefully planned, say Tomoko Yokoi and Michael Wade at IMD Business School
7 December 2022
Victims of their own success  
Article
Victims of their own success  
DigitalTechnology ManagementGrowth
The world’s largest technology companies have delivered stellar growth, but the good times may prove their eventual undoing, argues Mike Wade, Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD Business S...
18 November 2022
Report
Getting started in digital responsibility
DigitalSustainabilityEthics
The benefits of digital technologies are well-known by now. They can be a critical element of business growth, innovation, and operational continuity. The adoption of digital technologies has been l...
1 October 2022
Article
디지털 시대, 충족되지 않은 니즈를 찾아라
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
4 July 2022
Article
Dijital çağda Karşılanmamış İhtiyaçları Belirleyebilmek
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
1 July 2022
Article
Identifying unmet needs in a digital age
DigitalEntrepreneurship
Innovation is all about finding and filling people’s unmet needs. But even innovators and organizations renowned for their scanning capabilities often have trouble perceiving and correctly interpre...
1 July 2022
A taxonomy of 24 digital transformation KPIs
Article
A taxonomy of 24 digital transformation KPIs
InnovationDigitalTechnology Management
Digital transformation initiatives often fail because they lack clear objectives. Michael Wade and Massimo Marcolivio explain how to communicate the ‘good numbers’.
17 June 2022
In uncertain times, it pays to keep your options open
Article
In uncertain times, it pays to keep your options open
LeadershipDecision Making
A series of global shocks has made effective decision making incredibly difficult. Our experts offer three practical steps to get the balance right.
16 June 2022
Article
How to impact humanity: A lesson from history
Innovation
Given that the 120th anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize took place on December 11, 2021, we felt the time was right to celebrate the life's work of its inaugural recipient, Swiss businessman Henr...
1 April 2022
Unpacking the digital transformation at IKEA
Article
Unpacking the digital transformation at IKEA
DigitalTechnology ManagementStrategyInnovation
In an IbyIMD interview, Barbara Martin Coppola, Chief Digital Officer of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), explains how she is helping to take the company, famous for its out-of-town stores and physical p...
15 February 2022
Best practices to implement and accelerate your business transformation