One on One with BCG Digital Ventures' Jeff Schumacher

Today, digital expertise is not something that's nice to have. It's mandatory to stay competitive. Companies looking for an advantage are seeking experts to bring their operations into the digital age. To that end, The Boston Consulting Group has launched BCG Digital Ventures, with the sole purpose to partner with clients to help develop, launch, and transform their digital initiatives. The new firm will leverage BCG's digital assets and resources, and has been staffed with a team of seasoned operators, entrepreneurs and advisors, helmed by Jeff Schumacher, former Managing Director and Cofounder of Booz Digital. Schumacher sat down with Consulting magazine to talk about the launch, the firm's goals, and the next digital frontiers.

Consulting: What led to the launch of BCG Digital Ventures?

Schumacher: When the opportunity arose to create a new digital business within BCG, we all immediately saw the potential to extend BCG's capabilities to the full digital value chain. BCG Digital Ventures is a first-of-its-kind business, bringing unique capabilities to create and grow disruptive digital products and platforms. Our areas of expertise are innovation, product development and commercialization. Building on BCG's substantial experience and capabilities, we go beyond providing consulting, design, and technology services to form strategic venture teams with clients. We are not here to do cute design work, develop an iPhone app, or make a strategy look better. We're looking to rapidly develop, launch, and grow transformational digital products, platforms, and businesses. We are a combination of what venture capital, design, and management consulting firms do.

Consulting: What are some of the goals for the new business?

Schumacher: One key goal is to drive true growth for our clients and help them to stay relevant in the digital era. Building new startups and strategic pivots for clients is a fundamental way that we are going to work with them going forward, where we have an enormous amount of flexibility to improve their businesses, beyond just consulting services. Another goal is to create a new environment for our people, where we not only build disruptive businesses and platforms for our clients, but also offer whole new career paths and opportunities for our people, where they are learning the operational aspects of building startups. A third goal is to create innovation in areas that can be helpful to the broader society. So whether it's building digital platforms to help chronic disease management, or building platforms to improve safety in cars, or creating platforms to enhance retail experiences—all of these things are ventures we anticipate working on across the globe.