Why a Digital Transformation Strategy Starts With People
A digital transformation strategy starts with people, says Loran Jacobs after a Rostov forum that offered builders instead of panels.
After Southern Innovations Forum 2025, Tech Entrepreneur Loran Jacobs discussed the event with Maxim Bolotov, President of the BRAINHORN Association of Digital Solutions Developers and one of the creators of the Rostov Region IT Education Foundation. They looked at why this innovation forum felt different from typical industry meetings, how participants arrived at a shared view of strategy, and why a human-centric approach matters in the digital world.
Why This Innovation Forum Broke the Formula
Industry events tend to follow a predictable formula, even at the highest level, and expectations are usually modest. A forum built around builders rather than competitors changes the dynamic. Participants meet people who complement their world instead of rivals: a banker with a technical background who treats strategy as engineering work, and startup founders who defend an idea with real fighting spirit before they have a finished product. For an investor, that kind of commitment creates a powerful effect: you want to believe in the founder and support him.
“We’re used to meeting lots of smart people, competing with them, fighting them, allying with them, so it’s very unfamiliar for us to see builders, people who aren’t driven by anything competitive but, on the contrary, seem to complement you and your world.” — Loran Jacobs
A Digital Transformation Strategy Without Panels
A format where every participant delivers a prepared statement tends to bore the audience and the participants alike. A different approach gives each person the space where they feel most comfortable, then draws every contribution into one theme, here digital transformation, and asks which strategy to choose right now. Conclusions come from the shared atmosphere rather than from prepared positions, and status layers disappear: instead of pompous titles, a banking guest can openly describe a delicate experiment inside his bank, which is unusual for a closed industry.
The result is one shared picture, in other words a shared view of digital transformation strategy rather than a set of competing opinions. Loran notes that even his own views on human-centricity were not born in him, but flowed out of that atmosphere.
A Human-Centric Approach to Technology
Such openness is rare in the technology world, and Loran admits he had honestly never felt this effect before. A human-centric approach ties the discussion together, because everything at the forum aims at personalizing human life in the new digital world. Self-organizing companies, from holacracy to sociocracy, are built on exactly this combination: people first on one side, and deep application of rules and technology on the other. Maxim Bolotov calls it another kind of symbiosis.
Watch the full podcast of Loran Jacobs and Maxim Bolotov on YouTube.
