Innovative companies are ones that can manage people and technology
Nearly every corporation likes to claim to be innovative but such opinions can be deceptive. Ask most people if they’re good drivers, the overwhelming majority will say they are – yet half an hour spent at the side of a busy road would soon show a disparity between belief and reality. You could say the same about businesses: which ones are really going places and which ones are heading for a crash?
What is innovation?
How then do you define an innovative company? Is it one that spends a good deal of money on expensive IT systems taking on board all the latest gadgets? Is it one that has employed expensive consultants redesigning its corporate identity to emphasis its inventiveness – or is it one that is using its IT infrastructure to support its own employees to drive change. Technology on its own isn’t enough; there are the employee skills and the underlying ecosystem to take into account.
The health industry is a prime example of how this can work. Medical teams can take on board the latest technologies to match their specialist skills, creating greater care for patients. Technologies that were once thought part of science fiction, are already with us: doctors can use software to find suitable donor organs: patients can be contacted instantly, while remote sensors keep tabs on their vital data.
The need for teamwork
Enterprises generally don’t have life and death riding on their every decision but the same processes can be in place: there’s the same need for teamwork, the same requirement to know that technology is not technology for technology’s sake but is working to an end.
Speaking at Dell’s Innovation Day, James Stikeleather, chief innovation officer at Dell noted that innovation is the ability to take that knowledge and convert it back into capital, by creating a value proposition from it. “We don’t see innovation as necessarily a new technology, but rather new technologies and knowledge made manifest into a value proposition for the customer,” he added.
So, if it’s not the acquisition of new technologies for their own sake that makes the difference, there’s the speed of connection, both physical in the sense of broadband accessibility but also in the way that customers and partners can be engaged in a timely manner. Companies can obtain new instant feedback on new products and services these days, either through websites or through social media and that sort of interaction propels innovation.
Coming together
There is also the multitude of technologies available. Organisations are no longer tied by the limitations of their data centres. The arrival of cloud has changed the nature of computing power and storage by offering far more scalability, breaking some of the physical inhibitors faced by enterprises, while the near universality of mobile broadband and improved telephony has removed geographic constraints. At the same time, greater analytic processes enable organisations to delve deeper into customer data and make business critical predictions.
Everything is about the right combination: companies can acquire information from a variety of sources and use it more effectively: it’s not just about data, it’s about speed too. And, there’s a higher level of security to support it all.
All of these are tools that organisations can draw on but it’s the integration of all of them together that provides the cutting edge. Every company likes to think of itself as innovative but not all have that mix of technology, expertise and infrastructure in place that makes a real difference.
Max Cooter
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Tags: Business, Entrepreneurship