Digital Innovation Series: Where To Start

Innovation starts from within an organization. Although many external factors accelerate the urgency for change, an organization needs to organize itself around long-term, constant change. But, where do you commence?

Get ready to start innovating

Here are a few ideas that will help you determine the initial focus areas of your digital innovation projects.

Choose a department

Larger organizations know how difficult it is to focus on high impact projects. When it comes to digital innovation, this is not any different. Even-though senior management often-times recognize the need for change, taking a conscious decision on the first project is a challenge.

Focus on one single department, first.

It is admirable to aspire to work on digital change through-out the whole organization at once; the goals need to be realistic. Digital innovation might involve: Focusing concentration on non-core business pursuits. And, we know that the budgets for non-core matters are limited.

Core business process optimization

When choosing the right department to start with: Do not be afraid to go after the core business. For many organizations, the biggest levers of digital innovation involve process-optimization topics; innovation is not only a “new business” topic.

Digital innovation can be about doing things more efficiently, too.

Therefore, take time to speak with the teams in your group, about processes that they deem valuable. Within the teams, there are plenty of ideas, that will help direct the organizational attention on the appropriate points.

Many employees, many manual processes

Most companies are people-businesses. A large amount of the work is done by human hands. Which is great, and this does not necessarily need to change, either.

Digital innovations can help your employees, not only work more efficiently but make work easier and more enjoyable.

Focus on making work more enjoyable and fun

Introduce new tools that raise employee satisfaction

Moreover, aiding employees in their daily work raises the morale of your company. Additionally, I believe this inspires workers to help with innovation efforts.  Furthermore, significant savings through automation and digitization are usually possible for most organizations. This starts with your employees.

Companies with innovation labs

A powerful tool for larger corporate organizations are innovation labs. Hence, change-labs develop new tools and ideas that can be used throughout the entire organization.

Make sure you deliver tangible results

In my experience, not every department within an organization is equally open to change. Hence, it helps to focus on those departments which are, in the initial stage of the process.  

Doing so will allow the change management team to deliver tangible results. Essentially, any innovation project must be seen and lived in the organization. The more tangible the results are, the better.

I hope these ideas will help you find out where to start innovating your company. Feel free to reach out, if you would like to dive deeper into the topic of digital innovation management for your organization.

Best, Remco