How to Reignite Innovation for Business Breakthrough
Challenges posed by the outbreak of COVID-19 are diverse and significant. Companies have shifted the biggest focus to respond to the fast-evolving and unprecedented variables and struggles over how the business operates without severe interruptions brought by the crisis.
As the pandemic continues to unfold, many companies have managed to develop crisis management plans specific to this public health crisis, and it’s time to build recovery plans to overcome the economic fallout from Covid-19.
Covid-19 crisis has caused many constraints, limitations and pitfalls to the society and economy, which has forced us to create and adapt to new ways of living, working and learning. Different challenges and the economic downturn caused by the crisis have pushed businesses to focus their attention to design thinking, coupled with digital innovation.
Design Thinking plus Digital Innovations
Design thinking is a process for practical and creative problem solving with a human-centered and collaborative approach.
Digital innovation is the application of technologies to improve existing business processes, addressing problems and exploring new opportunities to make positive changes.
Things in the world keep changing. Combining design thinking with digital innovation can help companies to identify, change and improve the status quo – ultimately achieving suitability, meeting market demands and stimulating business growth. It is worthy to note that being digital innovative is not about inventing the latest technologies, systems or products. Delivery of innovations can be a recombination of existing technologies in new ways to enable value-driven changes like improving business processes, bettering customer experience, creating new business models or enhancing workforce efficiency.
How to Drive Business Innovations to Protect Your Business
1. Cultivate an innovative mindset with Empathy and Doubt
Empathy and doubt are a helpful pair of elements to enable a mindset for innovation. The former element allows you to walk in your customers and employees’ shoes to gain empathetic understanding of their experiences, expectations and any hidden issues involved, which as a result leading you to the core problems to be solved; the latter one helps you to rethink and refresh the way how you got things done, rules you are operating under and assumptions you always have in making decisions. Challenging existing perspectives and processes helps strengthen your practical creativity for continuous improvements and business breakthroughs.
2. Data Analytics Help Fuel Innovation
Big data has transformed how the business world works, given rise to new business models and spurred lots of innovations. Self-driving cars, highly personalized entertainment platforms and AI doctors are all examples of data driven innovation (DDI) around us. Mining through a ton of data unveils hidden patterns and linkages which empowers you to drive the creation of new products, processes or systems that fill measurable needs and problems. Yet, data is being generated from numerous sources at an accelerating velocity every second around the globe. If the capability to collect data has not been matched by their ability to manage and analyze information, companies will fail to tap into this source of innovation for ever-changing demands in the market.
3. Building the Innovation Ecosystem
Anyone in your company with futuristic ideas can be a potential source of good innovations. We have seen companies assembling innovation teams composed of employees from business and IT teams to come up with cool digital innovations. Yet, relying mainly on internal sources to innovate requires a great deal of time and resources which could be a root cause of innovation failure. To create an agile innovation ecosystem, you can combine internal and external players, like external trend scouts, external partners and customers, to steer innovation initiatives efficiently and ensure an open-minded perspective. After creating the right network of innovation sources, your team can leverage process management tools to identify potential areas and set the parameters for delivering innovations.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, COVID-19 has made innovation a business imperative to allow an organization to reinvigorate business growth. To remain competitive and recover from the pandemic, companies should put innovation at the center of their recovery plan to identify opportunities and risks in order to move the business forward. Changes in our ways of living, working and interacting have taken the “normal” from us, which hence have given us the opportunities to rethink, break through and create successful digital innovation.
Talk to our team to get advice and information about our digital transformation services to protect your business from the fallout from Covid-19.
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