We've never had to be more innovative than we are now. Andy O'Sullivan is Solutions Engineer who works in our innovation hub – Incubator. He spoke at Digital DNA 2020 and has condensed that talk into a Medium blog.
What is innovation? Is it blockchain? Serverless? Quantum computing? These are the type of technologies that get mentioned a lot in innovation discussion, but to me, regardless of the tech or whichever hype curve they’re on, innovation is simply delivering new value.
Delivering new value means actually doing it — creating it, building it, making it real. Ideation is not innovation, it’s just coming up with ideas — innovation is about execution, as it’s the only way to find out is there real value in the ideas.
Delivering new value means that it’s something new for your company. If your competitors already have chatbots in their call centres but yours doesn’t, is making a chatbot innovation? Yes — for you.
What if you already have some chatbots, should you build another one? If it makes business sense, absolutely — but not with your innovation capacity. It’s critically important to protect and reserve your innovation capacity & resources for new products and services, as this is how you keep up with your competitors, and/or gain competitive advantage.
Delivering new value means making money or saving money. Large amounts of money. In a large enterprise with billions of dollars of revenue, innovation efforts should be focused on moving the needle enough to make or save millions of dollars.
