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Building innovation into your enterprise business

So when it comes to building innovation into an enterprise business, how do you do it?

If you want to discover how building innovation into your enterprise business will help you achieve success, you need to consider both cultural and technological tools.

Organisational strategies can encourage innovation, and so to can ideas management software tools. Here we outline how to embed an innovation approach.

Why is innovation capability important?

Innovation is an important aspect of any modern business, and we have moved well beyond thinking of innovation capabilities as a “nice to have.” The modern organisation looks, behaves, and performs nothing like its predecessors. Establishing an environment that supports innovation isn’t always easy, especially among remote workforces.

It's not uncommon for e-commerce enterprise businesses to have employees all over the world. They may have sales reps in Europe, distribution outlets in India, manufacturing in Asia, product design in America, off-shore IT support, or be run from within Australia. Even businesses based entirely in Australia may have employees scattered across three time zones. The internet and globalisation have forever changed how we do business.

Managing culture in a virtual team

Creating a culture that encourages innovation is critical, but can be tricky when your remote workforce are not sharing a physical space. If this is the case for your enterprise business, then we suggest creating a team or business vision and values that reflects and honours your remote workforce. Make it an integral part of who you are!

For example, if you want to reinforce your flexibility as one of your unique team skills or drivers, create a value that showcases this trait. Or maybe it’s initiative you focus on, which is highly valued among people who are working on their own. Or, do you value accountability which can help you ensure employees commit to delivering results wherever they are based.

To manage culture in a virtual team, you can organise virtual team-building activities, encourage regular virtual meetings, and provide opportunities for virtual social interactions. Other strategies for creating an innovation culture include:

Focusing on clarity and clear communication around the organisation, and make sure everyone understands the context and importance of their work. This not only ensures that everyone is on the same page but also makes your team feel understood and considered. Set up remote teams or project groups to encourage shared goals, targets, and support networks
Emphasising the importance of setting a solid definition and clear expectations of work – this means ensuring that employees aren't working outside of designated hours in an attempt to manage communication and workload
Ensuring effective diary management - so that employees can easily determine their colleague's availability at a glance and scheduling and sticking to regular breaks
Employing a good project management tool, so that everyone can quickly and clearly see the status of projects and associated tasks

The importance of communication and collaboration

True innovation always involves collaboration, and is achieved through sharing ideas, being playful, encouraging creativity, and creating an environment where people feel comfortable speaking up and making suggestions.

Opening communication channels enables information to flow both up and down the organisations, helping create an environment conducive to innovation.

New technology, such as collaborative platforms and project management tools, can enable open communication through one-to-one exchanges and shared ideas and exchanges across bigger groups and work teams. These tools not only facilitate communication but also provide a platform for sharing and developing innovative ideas.

Managing technology in a virtual workforce

Many enterprise organisations now operate with employees based right around the world. If you're noticing a lack of cohesion or challenges with your remote workforce, here are some technology actions to try:

Conduct a technology audit – to ensure that everyone has what they need to enable them to work effectively
Set up secure single sign on (SSO) authentication processes, to enable employees to have access to the apps they need, when they need them
Use cloud-based file sharing, with clear structures and processes for document editing and management
Make everyone aware of your security systems and surveillance that you have in place to protect against data theft, damage, or disruption – and what processes you use to detect suspicious activity
Select software that enables you to establish a single source of truth
Establish clear procedures for shared tasks that need to be based on conventions, for example, file naming, file storage, and tone of voice or writing style guides
Decide upon communication tools and commit to using them – examples include Teams or Slack

Managing innovative ideas

Buying innovation in and getting external agencies to drive your changes and improvements might be tempting. However, it has been proven that often, the best innovation ideas come from within. To encourage innovation from within the workforce, especially when they are largely remote, you can implement a structured process for idea generation and development. This process can involve regular brainstorming sessions, idea submission and review, and implementation planning. Harnessing the innovation potential from within creates a much higher level of engagement and pride from staff.

Ideas management software enables you to gather and develop ideas. These ideas relate to improvement opportunities for everyday processes, observations about market trends, changes, or ideas generated by customer interactions or feedback.

What are your key drivers of change?
What marketplace changes have you noted?
What regulations or restrictions are in play?
What technologies are available to you?

Find the right tool

Technology is absolutely an enabler when it comes to innovation and engagement, especially among employees who don't work in the exact physical location. Ideas management solutions enable the effective tracking and monitoring of innovative ideas. Ideas management solutions offer technologies such as:

Sticky notes
Image upload
Interactive quizzes and surveys
Commenting and reactions
Markers and highlighters
Brainstorming templates

Idea management tools for innovation

Settings in ideas management tools also enable you to choose user access, interaction, and comment access and permissions. Any staff member can contribute an idea, which can then be funnelled and directed to the relevant business unit. These business units are commonly marketing, development, IT, people, and culture.

Ideas management tools enable you to:

Build a shared location for ideas and suggestions to be created
Securely manage ideas and comments
Encourage staff to share ideas and collaborate on proposals
Tag types of entries so they can be assessed and reported on
Have a structure and workflow for actioning ideas and opportunities

Integrating ideas management with ERP

Idea management tools can also be integrated with other solutions like employee or public engagement tools, intranet systems, or even Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems. There can be significant benefits in integrating your ideas management system with your ERP. These benefits include reducing the number of separate systems that staff need to access, improving efficiency and productivity, and providing a more holistic view of innovation opportunities. The ERP may be able to create and track ideas across a longer lifespan – right through from idea inception to product development and production, enhancing the innovation process.

Many ERPs use API data to integrate ideas management activity from a specialised innovation platform. Data that can be shared is generated at multiple vital points along the product design and lifecycle. Integrations with HR and organisational structure management solutions also enable you to monitor and consider employee engagement with elements like absences, years of service, or age to better understand who your organisation's real innovators are.

Generating employee buy-in and trust

If you want to take innovation opportunities seriously, your staff need a clear process for supporting ideas generation and delivery from start to finish.

When an employee raises an idea, and it is not actioned or followed up, they are likely to feel disgruntled and disappointed. While many organisations create a space where employees can leave feedback or share ideas, there often needs to be more response or closing of the loop on what is raised. You should make a commitment to responding to every single idea that is raised and set up a clear tracking process, which means staff members are kept informed about the status and progress of their ideas.

When every idea is taken seriously, and staff can see a clear record of progress, they are more likely to engage. Developing a way of showcasing and score-carding innovation ideas will demonstrate the impact that internal innovation can have.

Modify ways of working for innovation

If you are limited with the resources or time you need to create innovation opportunities, consider the dual operating system idea. Through this model, you designate certain staff to work on innovation and others to carry on with day-to-day operations. This ensures you have sufficient staff and time resources to keep the box running-people working to keep you on track and running, while the outside-of-the-box team is a dedicated group encouraged to trial new ideas in the opportunities in the name of innovation.

Set clear metrics

If you don't have measures in place, how can you track the success or otherwise of your innovation attempts? If you can't show how innovation has helped your business, it can be hard for people to get on board and keen to participate. Measure too much and it can become laborious and take away the novel, don't measure and it becomes very difficult for people to see the wins.

Having plenty of data is often an advantage, but, when the data doesn't have meaning or is data for data's sake, data collection and management can get in the way of the actual innovation you are encouraging. The key is to work out which data gives you the insights you are after, and which gives you a good balance of quantitative and qualitative information. Innovation metrics you can use include:

Number of new or refined products, services, delivered as a result of innovations
Growth as a result of innovation
Number of employees involved in innovation outcomes
Implemented innovations per employee score

Choose Pimcore for your enterprise business

Pimcore is a comprehensive solution for PIM, MDM, DAM, CDP, DXP/CMS, and ecommerce that can help your enterprise business innovate and take your offerings to the next level. Pimcore is currently used by more than 110,000 companies across 65 countries.

Pimcore users note:

Improved agility: by operating effective digital tools and solutions
Enhanced consistency: across a range of platforms and applications, and in both physical and online sales environments
Exceptional customer experiences: through intuitive website interfaces, portals, intranets and extranets
Sophisticated contemporary marketing automation: to get the right messages to the right customers as the right time

How does Pimcore encourage innovation?

Pimcore is an open-source solution. Using an open source solution means that the tool is always being upgraded, updated and can be customised to work in new ways.

Open source solutions are a smart choice for organisations with remote workers. Pimcore knows this, having determined that "97% of companies say that open innovation is important or even decisive to achieve higher levels of business performance."

Open source solutions offer:

Flexibility – constantly evolving to meet customer and consumer needs, responsive to sudden changes in legislation or regulation and enabling you to scale up your operations across any physical location
Security – regular patches and upgrades mean that you can stay ahead of emergent security or challenges rather than waiting for the latest data threats, breaches, and attacks to cause you trouble
Interoperability – making it easy to keep your websites, databases, and client records connected to other apps and products and up to date as changes in external solutions do occur

Open source tools enable innovation by bringing new ideas to market much faster, because you don’t have to wait or pay for extensive modification because This also makes integration with any new tools, marketplaces, or solutions much quicker and easier.

Adopting open source solutions can also revolutionise things if you are running old, outdated legacy systems. Open source can also be used as an affordable interim solution if you decide to embark on an all-out technological revolution.

Contact us if you would like to learn more about Pimcore can help you and your business to innovate. We are Pimcore partners and work with businesses to implement and embed new practices for effective data management.