Innovation – Time to Innovate?

Unprecedented Transformation

We are living through the most incredible transformation brought about by an unprecedented reaction and response to a once in a lifetime global pandemic.

Whether your business has been negatively impacted or positively impacted, it is very unlikely that you have been standing still. For the vast majority of businesses, the arrival of Covid-19 has been the biggest single catalyst to digital transformation since the invention of the silicon chip.

The challenge many businesses are now facing is how to innovate quickly enough to respond to the rapidly changing landscape, with innovation budgets and capacity being sorely tested. What can be done to break the logjam of bringing great ideas through to fruition?

In a classic model there are three key sources of technology innovation, business demand, technology research and grassroots ideas from within the organisation. These ideas will be filtered to create innovation horizons to be explored and tested.

At this point innovation management will kick in to take these unfiltered ideas on board for assessment and prioritisation. The initial effort will be to understand the potential demand and based in that to prioritise the progress of any given idea. Innovation management will manage the innovation backlog.

Once an idea is prioritised, the next key step is to bring it to reality through proof of technology or proof of concept. If the proof of concept is successful, the next stage will be to prepare the way to operationalise or industrialise the concept, to bring it to reality.

Innovative Innovation

The challenge many businesses are facing is that the initial steps of innovation are not resource intensive, however the proof of concept stage is likely to require additional resources, often with novel skills that may not be readily available in-house.

It is this crucial stage that can turn a simple idea into an outcome that can transform your business.

To support organisations at this stage Enterprise Blueprints are launching a range of ‘virtual’ services to support you. Specifically, to support you to take your concept through to viable solution we have established Innovation Lab as a Service.

ILaaS is specifically designed to bring together technology specialists from IT strategy through to complex engineering to enable the realisation of your concept.

At a time when remote working has become the norm one of the key barriers to a service like this has been removed to enable some key benefits for you: –

• Ownership of Innovation Management remains with you
• Independent unbiased validation of technology and hypothesis based on your requirement with no pressure of technology license sale and/or implementation revenue
• Applied pragmatic peer industry knowledge from delivered use cases for your proof of technology or proof of concept request
• Costs will directly relate to the number of service requests
• Increased flexibility to respond to spiky demand
• Increased speed to market through the use of best in class productivity tools and technologies, and not constrained by the more standard industrialised delivery process and governance

Of course, innovation can come in many forms and the ILaaS service catalogue reflects this.

For innovation associated with your existing technology stack, there will be an emphasis on integration and business case validation. Innovation that complements your existing stack the focus will shift more toward adoption. With truly disruptive innovation, breaking new ground for you, there will be a greater focus on market scanning and proposition development.

If you want to liberate and enhance your innovation pipeline, at a potentially lower cost with increased confidence in the outcome this could be a great fit for you.

If you would like to explore Innovation Lab as a Service and how it might benefit you, or you simply would like to share your thoughts on this, then please contact [email protected].

 

 

Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash