I often get asked, Kelvin, what is innovation?
Innovation is a buzz word that can mean different things to different people. It’s 2019 when I am writing this and business are at the early stages of going digital. It does seem that innovation has morphed in various flavours of digitisation of business process, automation and analytics.
Being such a broad topic, boards and c-suite staff of large corporate can often know they are sitting on a mountain of data, but not know where to start. The cool companies are all about digitisation right? (Forbes on digitisation)
The cool companies are using artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science which is all the rage to solve their business problems. (Myths of artificial intelligence debunked at Forbes).
But there is a big but….Is it true that all companies are ready for digital innovation?
How do you know if you are ready?
Well in most cases, boards want to adapt and adopt digital, but they don’t know where to start. If the board/c-suite starts with a lack of directed focus or a strong problem to anchor the innovation, then I can safely save that your project is doomed before you have even started.So define the vision and core business problem you want aim to resolve. Build the buy-in with the board, get funding and begin the long journey. Remember there is never a silver bullet solution so management must have their expectation set appropriately.
Also the dreaded “Proof of Concept” (“PoC”), whilst they can be useful and important to evaluate products and focus the solutions if you get stuff in an endless PoC the project suffers from a lack of productive results due to under investment and management will get frustrated that you can’t prove why you need to build the bigger solution. Avoid meaningless PoCs unless they have enough budget to prove a substantial point. Else simple just don’t start.
For innovation, I have helped large corporations, regulatory organisation with business processes that would normally involve hundreds of staff per event to be done instantaneously. In most cases where innovation is needed business processes are neglected, or can not be conducted for every event due to lack of resource. But have a material impact on the business performing its core business function and may also bring external pressures such as not fulfilling a statutory or regulatory duty.I help the management understand the critical problems they should invest and tackle through vertical deep dives through their business.And then I design a business flow that allows service scaling that leverages digitisation, machine learning, processing of unstructured data, or another relevant tech.
Please get in touch with me at [email protected] to find out more.