Innovation Lifecycle Webinar Recap

Rather read than watch the entire video? Here’s an overview of the key takeaways from the Innovation Life Cycle webinar:

The webinar focuses on “how to use people, processes, and technology in harmony to become successful in your innovation strategies.” The world is changing at a rapid pace, especially within the business sphere. We exchange information at a high rate, and this rate is bound to increase as time goes on. Change comes when it's least expected. It is important to take into account the impact that technological changes have on society rather than on technological advancement itself. We overestimate the impact that technology can have in 10 to 20 years, but we underestimate the innovative changes that technology can have in the short term. With AI on the rise, we have come to a pivotal point where time will tell what kind of impact this new technology is going to have on society. It is the people who can make or break the success of technological innovation based on having the right processes in place. 

With customer expectations higher than ever, people expect a smooth user experience without a steep learning curve for any product or service. Nowadays, customers want to feel independent when using technology through self-service in order to leverage a better experience. The same need for independence can be seen in businesses. They wish to be self-sufficient in creating the products and services that they offer their customers. Past market leaders, such as BlackBerry, Nokia, and WeWork, have failed to innovate and thus lost their product relevance to the consumer. Staying relevant is important, and that means being adaptable and continuously driving innovation. But how do you do that? There are various ways that companies wish to tackle innovation, but they lack the right know-how or people involved. Being innovative is all about having everyone within a company engaged, from janitor to CEO, from clerk to sales. By leveraging engagement, companies can identify real problems and improve the delivery of digital solutions. The key here is to have everyone within the company on board to make this happen. 

Boosting adoption rate 

The first step of the Betty Blocks Innovation Initiative Life Cycle is to inspire and engage people and gather ideas. A good use case to take as an example is the Dutch National Police. Through Betty Blocks, they implemented a tool called the Innovation Portal, which enabled them to engage employees through improved communication and collaboration in order to create better digital solutions. As a result, the adoption rate of new internal tools skyrocketed, with well over 2000 employees using the Innovation Portal. This allowed the Dutch National Police to gather continuous feedback while making employees feel engaged and rewarded. When developing a new application, validating business value through internal feedback is crucial. At Betty Blocks, we believe in business-led development; non-technical employees are encouraged to contribute to the software development process with the support of IT. By delivering applications that bring value to the organization and end-users, the adoption rate of innovative products is much higher. This results in a smooth rollout of the application. 

Innovation can only be successful if you have a centralized starting point. The benefits of setting up an Innovation Portal for your organization are increased engagement and the ability to share success stories. The Portal’s ease of use makes it simple for a company to sift through innovative ideas and pick the ones that will drive the most value.

Pluryn Customer Case Success

Due to increased strain on the overall healthcare system, Pluryn, a Dutch healthcare company, felt the need to organize its innovation funnel. With over 5000 employees within the company, there were plenty of opportunities and ideas to go around. But picking the right ones posed a challenge without the proper technical support that Betty Blocks brought to the table. Through Betty Blocks, Pluryn was able to hand-pick the ideas that would drive the most value and discard the ones that would end in bottlenecks. By getting internal employees directly involved, Pluryn was able to develop, test, and deploy new ideas with a high adoption rate. Continuous feedback is needed during development to know if the project is on the right track. The feedback can be used to augment the development process in a timely manner and avoid any pitfalls that might stagnate the project.

Many teams using low-code platforms collaborate on such a project as “business technologists.” These are employees within an organization who are business-educated rather than tech-educated. This means that they are not professional developers, yet they still contribute to most of the development process thanks to the Betty Blocks platform. Pluryn is particularly pleased with the platform’s ability to repurpose components for different projects, thus significantly speeding up the development time whenever a new project is kicked off. Having non-developers create apps using Betty Blocks is low risk due to the different layers of support that the platform offers. This allows them to focus on an agile approach when developing applications within the organization.

Want to learn more about how Pluryn utilizes citizen development fusion teams to take development needs into their own hands to drive innovation? Read the customer case here.