To scale the game-changing experiences your customers want, organizations need to innovate with a community of brilliant problem-solvers and revolutionary thinkers. While nine out of ten customers want omnichannel digital experiences, just 29% say companies provide this feature. How can organizations bridge that gap? This is where APIs come in. The third in our series of "App Innovation" ebooks explores the benefits of sharing APIs and business with other developers and organizations from crowdsourcing innovation, expanding your customer base and retaining existing customers.

Business Leaders have never been at the helm of so much change. The last year has forced virtually all industries to shift and adapt how they operate. Those with a knowledge of technology and the results it can achieve are at a real advantage when adapting to the unexpected. Digital excellence has now become an integral business requirement, not just an IT solution.

Looking at business resilience in a wider context, digital transformation is the key driver of innovation and operation efficiency during times of uncertainty. Whether you are facing challenges or opportunities, you must be able to reconfigure the things you already have to meet internal and external demands. More than ever before, your customers, developers, and partners look to APIs to drive operational efficiency, accelerate innovation, and create rich customer experiences.

In this new era, taking an outside-in approach to digital business ecosystems can help organizations harness their existing resources and relationships to drive new innovation and efficiency. Digital business ecosystems encompass a network of partners, developers and customers facilitated by modern, cloud-first technologies. Recently, Google Cloud, in partnership with Oxford Economics, surveyed 1,000 CIOs of large organizations (over $2 billion in revenue) to understand their digital business ecosystem strategies. This executive summary dives into the key findings from this research.

If a company hopes to remain competitive in today's hyper-connected world, it must speak to individuals, not broad segments. Businesses must consider all types of data generated by their customers-contextual and real-time, structured and unstructured-to deliver relevant and precise results on the most appropriate channel and device.

Sudden changes in consumption patterns of customers, employees, and partners may lead companies to experience an increasing demand for their digital services. These may come as a result of market shifts, technological shifts, or due to times of uncertainty. The more adaptive and resilient companies are internally, the faster they can evolve alongside their customers and markets to overcome challenges during times of uncertainty.

With tightening budgets, many enterprises will look to cut their digital transformation and innovation budgets in order to focus on keeping the lights on. But an API program provides an easy way for enterprises to keep the lights on while still pushing towards digital transformation. With an API-first approach, enterprises can continue their digital transformation initiatives, but with a focus on maximizing existing resources to boost developer productivity.

Field-tested Best Practices & Real-world Use Cases for Enterprise API Teams. Because APIs empower developers to harness data, functionality, and applications for new uses, enterprises have begun to increasingly investing in API product teams to expand their API programs.