People, processes, and tools, the right recipe for digital innovation

In today’s economy, innovation through new technologies has become the most relevant growth driver. Used both as a key differentiator from competition, or a source for improving customer experience, digital innovation should have an accelerated development cycle and a fast time-to-market. But even the most creative organization needs a proper partner to translate creative ideas into marketable products or services. Let’s find out why.

Traditionally, most businesses have focused on continuous improvement of their products and services to maintain a competitive edge. This is no longer efficient. Today, you should have a different approach, and this is why you need to shift towards innovation. If you take a look at the main disruption factors in the global or local markets, you will see that most innovations come from businesses that are almost entirely digital. You probably know that: Uber doesn’t own any cars, Airbnb doesn’t own any hotels, and Glovo doesn’t own any restaurants. Those are just a few examples of companies that harnessed the power of technology and launched game-changing products and services.

Areas of innovation

Innovation is driven by two factors: customers expectations and digitalization. First, you have to innovate to fulfill customer demands and expectations, and second, you could innovate mainly through technology and digitalization.

Y and Z generations (people born after 1990) already represent a large part of consumers, but they are seeing the world differently. They are the most tech competent of any generation and can multitask like never before, using up to five screens at once. Moreover, these generations want fast services, multichannel experience, always-on customer support, self-service, etc. From this perspective there are multiple areas where you could integrate digital innovation:

Product and services based on customer data

High level of personalization

Webapp and chatbot based self-services

Multichannel support

Always-on business

New monetization way

Offer experience not just a product

Renting and not selling

IT Teams helps European clients innovate

Case 1. Our German client selected IT Teams to develop their innovative solution that aims to automate enterprise processes through a dynamic approach of data capturing and data exchange.  In this project, we built a prototype that allows companies to define their business processes in an electronic format so that employees and users can perform their duties in line with the business processes. Unlike other business process-oriented software, this application allows the processes to be easily adapted to respond to specific situations and exceptions. The product glues together and integrates all the other IT systems and replaces the manual paper-driven activities. 

Case 2. Our client, one of the largest dental portals in the Netherlands, was looking to build an appointment scheduling system integrated with an e-commerce feature to provide users the ability to find a doctor, schedule an appointment and purchase dental products as necessary. In this project, IT Teams offered advised on the general architecture and based on the strong Drupal expertise, improve the existing system, built a flexible appointment scheduling system, and also integrate an eCommerce Drupal module within the client platform. Later on, IT Teams migrated Drupal from version 6.0 to version 8 and continues to date to provide maintenance services.

How a company could foster digital innovation?

In today’s world, innovation is multi-disciplinary and involves business, marketing, technology, software development working together during the product development process.  Moreover, digital products and services should offer a high level of simplicity, usability, and even esthetics to generate a positive experience. Look at Apple and Tesla, companies that integrate outstanding simplicity and minimalist design at the core of their product. Also, digital evolution means harvesting any opportunities on every channel, device, or platform available: wearables, web services, social media, smart devices, marketplaces, etc. For sure you are a creative company, but creativity is not innovation. Innovation involves a path that translates creative ideas into marketable products or services. Besides ideas, for digital innovation you also need:

People: skilled and highly focused on finding digital solutions to any innovation challenges. Think at: developers, software architects, technical consultants, project managers.

Processes: preferable an agile and iterative approach that allows releasing news products functionality more often, and easily integrate feedback in development sprints. Think of Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall.

Platforms and tools: state of the art technology for accelerating software development, testing, and prototyping with high efficiency and ubiquitous team collaboration. Think at: Javascript frameworks, Angular, React, Lamp, DevOps tools, etc.

If you have the right people, processes, and tools, you have an efficient recipe for transforming creative ideas into digital innovation. But, even if you are a startup or a well-established company, it is difficult to possess all the skills, so it is better to focus on your core competencies instead of trying to learn everything from the ground.  Moreover, digital technology generates highly complex innovation challenges (budget, resources, deadlines, etc) so that is why you need a partner. A powerful outsourcing partner, who has the know-how, resources, and even the infrastructure necessary for you to lower the risks and innovate successfully.

So if you are looking for an outsourcing partner that will be able to assist you on the digital innovation path, feel free to contact us or stay in touch by subscribing to our monthly newsletter.