WHY INNOVATION IS SO IMPORTANT IN THE NEW DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
Innovation will be increasingly critical for businesses in the future, especially those operating in relatively high cost and/or high value add environments. Innovation should not just be left to specialists within an organisation, they are often too far from the operating environment to really understand what is required. Besides, it’s a waste of all the other brains in an organisation. Also, in an era when technology and business models can be copied very quickly, creating a culture of Innovation in a business will give it a harder-to-copy competitive advantage.
We see three major types of Innovation within businesses, each of which can be aided by social business technologies and techniques:
Operational Innovation
The continual innovation to improve “business as usual”, often called Continuous Improvement. This is essential, but not enough for a business to survive, never mind thrive. To drive this innovation requires more than a suggestion box and a Work Study department. It requires a culture of continual improvement. This has been well known for decades, but social technologies make it far easier to pick up issues, facilitate collaborative work on them across a far wider brain-base, and implement changes. It also makes post implementation “bug fixing” far easier.
Product Innovation
Essential in most competitive industries. What social technologies bring is the ability to monitor the market and user base for far richer signals on where the problems and opportunities are, as well as drive both internal and external collaboration in developing and testing new solutions.
Business Model Innovation
Business today changes far more quickly than in the past. Social technologies allow businesses to pick up weak signals in their markets, analyse competitive moves, and react more quickly to changes. As with product innovation, it allows faster and more comprehensive solution development and testing. As with operational innovation, it allows faster implementation and “bug fixing”.
OUR APPROACH
We believe social technologies are key enablers for Innovation, in a number of ways:
- Picking up the weak signals – customer emerging needs, competitor moves, business shifts
- Crowdsourcing ideas within and without the enterprise
- Enabling collaborative working across teams within and without the enterprise
- Bringing in wider perspectives than just the development teams
- Early market testing
- Enabling a greater innovation culture within an enterprise
HOW WE CAN HELP
Core tasks we can assist with:
- Facilitating workshops, education and training to understand the opportunities, potentials and pitfalls of social system based Innovation
- Assisting in defining a social innovation strategy, both external and internal facing
- Selecting IT systems to use, and processes to make it work
- Implementation
Contact us immediately. Or else.