Innovation is the heartbeat of an organisation, helping to breathe life and longevity into what you do as well as contribute meaningfully to performance. Whether you’re innovating on your core business model to diversify profit streams or adding new products to an existing lineup, innovation is a complex undertaking that organisations invest in and embark on.
As an organisation, your innovation efforts provide equal parts of rewards and challenges. Some of those challenges range from the scarcity of ideas to an abundance of ideas. Then further challenges appear once business needs to decide which ideas to support. Your resources are allocated predominantly on maintaining the performance of your core business, leaving a tiny fraction of time and capital to invest in innovation initiatives. Internal processes are often bureaucratic, sometimes unclear, and aren’t structured for innovation success.
Innovation tends to be inwardly focused, with a lack of external partners and collaboration opportunities which bring together talent, knowledge and skills that strengthen and enhance innovation efforts.
For innovation to thrive within your organisation, there needs to be three, equally-weighted elements present: creativity, structure and a collaborative ecosystem.
Over ten years, Digitlab has been innovating in digital and building products for our clients. These experiences have brought with it an understanding of the complexity involved in innovating with external partners. This paper explores our learnings through our Humancentric Framework and how a business can successfully Innovate Outside.
