Whether your business is a start-up or a titan of industry, innovation has become the new normal. Our ability to pre-empt and capitalise on change to create new opportunities is now essential for letting our enterprise thrive.
To innovate, you need to see opportunity
No one can innovate blind, that’s why it’s impossible to scale any new innovations across large geographies or diverse customer demographics unless they’re based on solid customer insights.
This may seem obvious, but those insights need to be found and processed quickly enough to be of use – otherwise the opportunity just passes by. Speed and accuracy are key, and when customer information pools within the business are connected through robust, standardised processes, game-changing insight makes it to the table quickly enough to actually change the game!
Some signs that this isn’t happening include:
- Innovations being developed but not executed, or just failing
- Innovations being adopted by only one part of the business, and ignored by others
- Management struggling to get full visibility without proper measurement tools
Bad for innovation, bad for business
Unfortunately, the damage done by inefficiencies goes beyond impeding innovation, as a lack of defined process also tend to cause problems with data and service delivered.
What’s worse is that you also get a lack of visibility, meaning these issues then go unnoticed until lead-to-cash conversions become stagnated and start to choke off revenue.
Designing innovation
Achieving innovation demands truly cohesive collaboration and a change in mindset that revolves around aligning technologies and processes with customer needs. It’s all about design thinking.
And, in implementing these innovations, it becomes equally important to give them room to breathe. Create processes and roll them out early for fast feedback, taking successes forward while pulling back what’s not working. It’s easier to do this if governance over process is less restrictive, allowing months of testing to be bypassed and an agile, ‘okay to fail’ process culture to take root.
Walking the process tightrope
The balance between staying efficient and innovating is a precarious line to walk sometimes – how do we do we give each its due without feeling schizophrenic? Whether through processes, offerings or technology adoption, getting the best results from your key business initiatives needs a practical approach, and sometimes a little help from the experts.
At Clarasys, we help you identify the key areas where your business is being held back, and give you the tools to help you move forward again.
