Marketers are facing some interesting challenges nowadays. Customer engagement is at the heart of almost all business strategies but implementing customer-focused initiatives has become a common pain-point across marketing teams. Nimbus Ninety members convened at Threadneedles Hotel in Bank to discuss how to build a framework for implementing successful strategy.

We’re rapidly moving into the 2020s with the promise of a disruptive and innovative decade. Businesses have to adapt to the upcoming change or face being left chasing the rest of the pack. Nimbus Ninety members gathered over breakfast at The Embassy in Victoria to discuss how to set up their businesses’ infrastructure to cope with the demand that the next ten years is going to put on them.

As the Middle East’s start-up capital, Tel Aviv churns out business after business. Whilst tourists love the hustle and bustle of the city, for the everyday commuter, the network of minivans (called sheruts) mean multiple transfers and untimely travel. During a typical lengthy commute, Via co-founders, Oren Shoval and Daniel Ramot, began to wonder how useful a flexible, on demand bus experience, enabled by technology, would be. Enter Via.

Economic “bigness” has gone too far. Economists and political commentators have frameworks to tackle it, but allowing tech giants to grow and absorb small competitors has squashed tech democracy.

Platform companies and digital innovators have redefined the concept of scale, enabling game-changing products and services to reach customers more rapidly than ever before.

We spoke to Gavin Esler, former host of Newsnight and author of "Lessons from the Top", about what "trust" means in business and politics today. Is there a double standard?

"Businesses fail when they go straight to the tactics,” Gavin Esler, former host of Newsnight and renowned BBC journalist, told me a few weeks ago. I asked what they should start with instead. “Objectives,” he replied. “Objectives, then strategy and only then can they look at the tactics."

Many businesses today feel data-drowned, spending 80% of their time and resources cleaning and preparing data but yet not getting the insights they need. Data preparation is seen as the biggest bottleneck to driving analytical outcomes, but it’s also the biggest opportunity to unlock new value and accelerate performance.

Digital ambitions are dependent on cloud to bring intuitive experiences and data-rich services to life, depending on your multi-cloud strategy and ongoing management. With businesses today needing to deliver better customer experiences than ever to compete in the market, it’s vital to understand the journey from current experimentation to industrial-strength innovation. Driving purposeful innovation at scale has three key ingredients: knowing when to move initiatives out of the lab and into mission-critical business processes; integrating AI into the cloud; and de-risking the transformation process.

Tech commentators have been repeating the mantra “data is the new oil” for years. But with new challenges arising across industries, it’s becoming clear that this aphorism doesn’t give the full story. 45% of business leaders in 2019 considered generating and using insight from data effectively as their biggest challenge for the year.1 Data is no longer the new oil; knowing how to use the data is. Data itself is useless without the insight it gives an organisation.