*Updated August 2022
Fostering business innovation not only helps businesses remain ahead of the competition and protect their earnings, but it also makes for healthier workplaces with continuously greater levels of staff retention.
Growing an innovation culture is especially important in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic the world has been going through. Thousands of businesses cut a large number of job positions throughout the entire world, so developing product innovation is essential to open new opportunities for professionals.
Many organizations, however, are behaving very differently. While this desperation is understandable given the pandemic's near-collapse of the global financial system, some companies, even when confronted with the same fatal threat, are taking advantage of new opportunities.
PepsiCo, for example, initiated a new age of operational agility during the first wave of COVID-19, while Mastercard and Microsoft partnered up to drive open innovation within commerce and startup ecosystems. Many companies also embraced new business models to overcome the challenges of the pandemic and come out stronger.
Business innovation benefits
Companies are concentrating more than ever on the advantages of promoting innovation culture. To assist in developing new ideas and processes, 63% of organizations have chief innovation officers. Business Innovation can bring many benefits, including:
-Gaining competitive advantage. Companies that devote time, attention, and capital to developing new and better methods of production have a strong position in the market.
-User-centric products. The continual emphasis on meeting the requirements of consumers is ensured by testing innovative methods to services and products. This aids in the development of a loyal client base and guarantees that a firm remains responsive to consumer demand.
-Higher employee retention. Employees with greater levels of creativity and analytical thinking respond well to an innovative working strategy, which helps organizations retain their finest talent.
How can businesses foster creativity and business innovation?
It's not easy encouraging business innovation. Several things may get in the way, from managing conflicting corporate goals to overcoming internal opposition and inertia.
Unleashing the inventive potential of your people - and your organization as a whole - requires a combination of management techniques, mutual interests, strategy, and resources, regardless of industry.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to encouraging business innovation. This process varies from business to firm and is influenced by factors such as workplace culture, established processes, and the talents and abilities of your employees.
In this article, we’re going to show an overview of the most common ways to leverage business innovation and offer tips on how to get the most out of them.
1. Encouraging customer feedback as part of an innovation strategy
Companies that keep their ears to the ground and listen carefully to what their consumers actually want are the most successful. Interaction is more important than ever when the epidemic affects consumer behavior. Managers are continuously trained on how to create digital communication efforts that support a customer-centric experience.
It can be done through social media channels, website blogs, and other digital means of communication. In those cases, consider using appealing visual elements, shared WordPress hosting for more security, etc. Details like these will help create a better customer experience.
Because of the growth of new media, today's customers have more power than ever before, and engagement techniques must incorporate customer feedback tools so that businesses may get timely and up-to-date viewpoints. Successful businesses have recognized this and have made client communication a fundamental part of their open innovation strategy.
People's shopping patterns are evolving as a result of the rise of e-commerce transactions and the desire to stay at home, so paying close attention can help you and your team figure out what issues to address next.
2. Improving communication if working remotely
Due to the pandemic, many businesses shifted to remote work, making communication a challenge. Consider whether you can keep your employees speaking with each other while also ensuring that they have the unique communication tools they require. For example, cloud storage services are essential for exchanging data and records.
Workflow management solutions, which allow remote workers to track their progress and manage deadlines, are also beneficial. Slack and Trello are two popular examples of these communication platforms. Don't forget to give training and assistance to staff who may be using any of these technologies for the first time if necessary.
But don't forget that training is crucial to adapt your staff to the everchanging needs of your organization. For instance, project managers should be motivated to enroll in PMP certification training to improve their skills online if needed.
In order to boost efficient communication in your remote working environments, utilize tools like video remote interpretation to ensure smooth communication and translation.
3. Partnering up with innovative companies & open innovation
Another method to develop creativity and business innovation is to collaborate with other creative businesses.
Open innovation and collaboration leads to valuable consumer insights and collaborative efforts on significant initiatives that may improve and enhance the customer experience.
Companies that engage their customers, use external innovation tools, and use these resources to develop the most fantastic open innovation strategy will have a competitive advantage to outlast the pandemic. This should be a long-term collaboration in which both sides share the same objective of producing more customer-centric product innovation.
Companies may use their partners' knowledge in new technologies to test and validate which technologies can be better applied to provide additional value for customers, allowing them to build a larger range of product innovation and opportunities for growing their market share and impact. For instance, an expense report management tool can partner with travel management products and accounting software to provide a seamless pre-accounting experience for its clients.
4. Rewarding well-performing employees to maintain an innovation culture
Corporate leaders at an average company recognize the necessity of acknowledging their workers' successes to keep them engaged and motivated. It's easy to forget that remote employees deserve the same amount of assistance when you don't see them every day.
Keeping track of your employees' progress, regardless of where they are, is a great approach to ensure you don't overlook their achievements. On the other hand, recognizing everyone’s accomplishments leads to more satisfied workers, decreased talent churn, and enhanced company branding. It also increases employee creativity by increasing motivation, which helps to maintain the innovation culture that your company should strive towards.
5. Fostering co-creation and open innovation
When a business co-creates, it enlists the help of outside experts as consultants. Consumers, vendors, designers, suppliers, marketers, retailers, and other professionals in your area might make up that group.
In some ways, co-creation and open innovation resembles a more enjoyable form of jury service. Everyone has the opportunity to exchange ideas, analyze sketches and computer-rendered models, test prototypes, and offer constructive critique throughout the group's debates. These in-depth sessions usually begin before a single concept drawing is created and continue until the product is available for purchase.
Open innovation and co-creation may be considerably more informative and provide deeper insights than standard market research approaches. For years, marketers depended on inflexible methods like internet surveys, phone polls, and paper questionnaires.
People, on the other hand, frequently respond to these tactics half-heartedly or just say what they believe corporations want to hear. Furthermore, some responders have a limited understanding of the topic, which might distort the results.
However, when a group of informed, enthusiastic people gathers in the same room, they may have lively and engaging debates. Those discussions frequently go to unexpected places, and they may spawn daring ideas that none of the group members would have come up with on their own.
6. Using data-driven innovation (DDI)
Today's most successful businesses are all data-driven. Consider the companies Google, Alibaba, and Amazon. The pace with which these businesses innovate is a crucial element. An important objective for businesses should be to use a data-driven platform that is fast.
These platforms are designed to find and recognize important innovations while combining AI-derived quantitative and qualitative data.
The majority of quantitative data comes from existing databases, while qualitative data is gathered over time through several interviews with specific firms. After that, the AI capabilities analyze a variety of aspects such as talent, management, and competitive advantages and disadvantages. A company may instantly find and access a new world of trends and ideas by evaluating relevant data and patterns, which could be the right solution for their clients.
How to up your innovation strategy with Valuer?
Executing a traditional innovation strategy and initiative can be exhausting and time-consuming.
Valuer’s platform can help you optimize this process and get to innovative solutions faster. Here’s how:
Make data-driven insights your innovation strategy
Based on millions of data points, Valuer creates a list of business cases and identifies commonalities in different product offers and business models. These are used to determine a client's likelihood of success, market maturity, degree of fit, and level of innovation. This approach, for example, may help the client detect security problems, reduce energy waste, and increase the use of renewable energy.
Using proprietary machine learning algorithms, Valuer's platform gathers millions of publicly available data points from the global innovation economy. These algorithms will serve as your AI assistant, guiding you through our platform.
Our data-driven innovation platform will collect data, translate it into hundreds of languages and dialects, and organize it in a way that offers you everything you need to uncover any market opportunity and lead you toward data-driven innovation.
The user does not need to assess data to improve decision-making; instead, Valuer's algorithms do it. The innovation platform bridges the gap between raw data and smart decisions by providing critical data-driven insights.
Discover actionable insights
We begin by analyzing the entire global innovation ecosystem for a holistic image of what patterns and changes in the market are driving the sector, so you can better understand and gain insights about an industry, advancements, or how sustainability is included. In turn, a picture of market development and a map of the key market opportunities in a given area is at your disposal.
The scan may be used to identify business opportunities and track how new technologies are spread. This information may help you remain on top of potential market repercussions, both directly and indirectly, as well as determine how much money you should put into the industry. The client may then choose a relevant industrial area to focus on and begin a deeper micro dive into the business models, products, and concepts used by successful companies and innovative startups in that market.
Get a strategic innovation partner
Instead of providing a one-time consultation, we create long-lasting partnerships with our customers. We're a flexible, out-of-the-box innovation platform where everyone wins. We have the capacity to create customized services and procedures that align with our clients' goals and expertise.
Simply said, the Valuer platform aids you in uncovering untapped markets and identifying companies that suit your unique needs. So far, we've assisted companies such as BMW, PwC, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Grundfos in identifying innovation possibilities.
Open a whole new world
You can start to search for companies or technologies by description. This option allows you to specifically define the parameters of interest and insert the description that explains in detail the specific technologies or applications that interest you; it can also be in the form of short bullet points. Our NLP-powered algorithm will choose the most important aspects of your search and provide you with a list of the most relevant results
Additionally, you can start a look-alike search. Simply enter the company's name, and the algorithm will detect other companies that resemble its description. Our AI will find and present you with firms that meet your criteria and lead you down a road to open innovation.
Valuer is for business innovation
Your company's future is being decided right now. Have no fear if you believe your firm is being left in the lurch by fast-moving, creative rivals. Fear is the number one opponent of imagination, and as we've seen, fostering imagination and creative thinking is essential for your organization when it comes to embracing an innovation culture.
There are several methods to begin bringing innovation strategy into your organization, yet substantial change does not occur overnight. Start small, then gradually extend until your organization is at the peak of invention and originality.
Regardless of what famous leaders say, fostering business innovation isn't all rainbows and unicorns. It takes time, effort, and a certain level of forgivingness for mistakes and failures to get to an inventive workplace. Even the most successful and visionary firms have a fair number of failures.
So, while you try to foster an innovation culture, don't be shocked if the changes prove to be more challenging to execute than you anticipated. However, Valuer’s platform is here to provide you with a personal AI innovation assistant that covers all your bases.
It might take a long time to innovate. Whether you're pursuing an incremental or a radical innovation strategy, it'll almost certainly take longer than you think. Invest in tools that will make the journey not only easier but also efficient.
