Digital Innovation Ecosystems
What do you think of as perfect innovation?
In the decade of the 2020s it will all be about ecosystems. The main advantage is going to result from connecting the relevant information within the ecosystem. In this article you will find out why...
Ingredients of Perfect Innovation
The perfect innovation you probably have thought of fulfills three dimensions for sure. It is most probably solving a problem, using a technology and targeting at least one specific user need. That sounds easy. Actually for a young software developer who is expert for the latest technology and identifies a problem in his personal life which makes him the user at the same time this might be crystal clear. He needs to sit down, work on the product, test it with his peers and might create great innovation. So it is simple as that? Actually yes, but how is a company supposed to be innovative like that?
The Challenge for Companies
For companies the complexity is much higher. Lets say a companies' CEO runs a 50 person sales team. They will have an incredible knowledge about the customers' needs and their goals.
The same company has a product development team consisting out of 150 engineers. They are experts on their field, highly skilled with the latest technology and always on top of their game. They know which new technologies are coming up in the next few years and how these can be used to extend the product portfolio.
Both sides, engineers as well as salesmen might have great ideas towards problems they observe. Possibly these ideas might target completely different problem spaces but there will be some valuable ideas on both sides. If the herein described company is similar to most companies today there will be two things to connect both worlds:
Product Managers will keep an eye on product development, sales and the future needs of the customers.
The company will have an idea management system that anyone can post and share his ideas.
Unfortunately that is not enough to handle the complexity between so many stakeholders and it ignores the question of which ideas to work with.
Where are the best innovations coming from?
The best innovations are created whenever the right knowledge was accessible to the right persons. The above mentioned student had all the necessary technical knowledge as well as knowing and understanding the problem in depth and the idea. That knowledge was accessible as it was in only one head. But in our exemplary company it is in 200 heads minimum. As long as people are only sharing their ideas there won’t be a substantial benefit for innovativeness. For successful innovation it is necessary to have an innovation ecosystem that exchanges ideas, problems and technical abilities to real innovations.
The digital innovation ecosystem
In order to achieve the perfect knowledge exchange around innovation and thereby create the basis for successful innovation it is necessary to get all stakeholders onto the same platform. Therefore we enable each group of stakeholders to design their own innovation process out of standardized steps. That means a rather problem oriented discipline can start by assessing the problem first, gathering customer voices around the problem, collect & validate ideas before finally assessing their technical feasibility. Other employees that are more creative might start with collecting ideas and creating prototypes that they test against user needs before assessing the business impact value. In all BlitzMinds solutions different method templates are shipped to our customers and can be adapted within minutes. Our artificial intelligence provides each user group with interesting existing data from the step they are currently working on (e.g. ideas, customer voices or problems). Thereby we support companies and innovation hubs to design their own digital innovation ecosystem which serves as a digital innovation space for any discipline.