Editor’s note: This originally appeared on Analyse Asia, a weekly podcast hosted by Bernard Leong, dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business, technology, and media in Asia. The podcast features guests from Asia’s vibrant tech community.
Rob Wickham, Regional Vice President, Innovation and Digital Transformation, from Salesforce joined us to discuss the footprint of the company and their recent published report on innovation in Asia Pacific. We discussed the major priorities and challenges in how Asian companies are contemplating in digital transformation and the forces that are holding back innovation.
Listen to the episode here or subscribe.
Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with timestamps included):
- Rob Wickham, Regional Vice President, Innovation and Digital Transformation, Salesforce(@rrwickham , LinkedIn) [0:38]
- How did you start your career? [1:07]
- In your career journey, what are the interesting career lessons learnt? [2:00]
- Salesforce [3:11]
- Can you briefly give an introduction to the company Salesforce to my audience and what it does? [3:11]
- What is your current role and coverage within Salesforce? [4:42]
- What’s the footprint of Salesforce in Asia Pacific? [5:52]
- Innovation: All eyes on Asia with YouGov’s research [7:03]
- What are the main objectives for Salesforce in building a report on innovation about Asia? [7:15]
- Does Asian companies’ thinking about innovation align with how Salesforce think about it? [10:16]
- The report reveals what Asia’s innovation landscape looks like from the perspective of key IT decision makers within the region, where do you see their priorities and challenges in thinking about innovation? [11:27]
- Where are Asia’s key innovations coming from? [14:22]
- Most leading Asian business leaders often agree that there is no one unified Asian culture, but Chinese, Japanese, Indian or their individual cultural nuance, does the cultural nuances and their level of economic development factor in how they think about innovation? [16:36]
- Is Asia ready to embrace innovation? There is inherent difficulties for most Asian companies to move from a traditional enterprise sales cycle to now SaaS models, what are your thoughts for them to break these barriers down? [19:24]
- How do we get Asian companies to embrace innovation? [20:01]
- How will you advise Asian companies to think about customer acquisition and retention with AI and Internet of Things embedded within? [22:09]
- What are the key trends to watch on innovation in Asia for 2017? [25:20]
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