Digitising is the new entrepreneurship
How internal innovation ‘dreamers’, who are experimenting with new ideas, can work with external innovation ‘doers’ to execute digital projects.
In business, we have to respond daily to rapid technological advancements and changing needs. In the world of software, development must match this by evolving into creative product design. All of our end-users expect a flawless experience — and if there is friction, that user is gone.
In the face of challenging digitisation issues, it is business-critical for organisations to make it easier and faster to deliver value for employees and customers. And to do this well requires coordinating data, technology, and the business with those users. Good user experiences are no longer enough, we all need to keep innovating to make a real change to the daily life of a user and ensure that every interaction feels right for them. For those of us building the solution, this often means starting with a mostly manual process and translating that into a digital experience. Behind the scenes, we are orchestrating a complex custom process (centralising data, coding functions, integrating within current IT landscapes) and then presenting it externally with an intuitive user interface that users can interact with.
For some of these tasks, you can use internal developers. But for a startup-style venture building something new and unique, you should bring in an external team. And they should be present much sooner in the process. That is because these projects now go further than just the automation of a process. It is about your company becoming entrepreneurial by experimenting, learning and innovating. Rather than just plugging in some software, you need to continuously optimise to remain competitive, rather than repetitive. The aim is to get your new digital landscape to work as hard as it can for your business. Innovations, like the ones we build for clients, bring awareness to all layers of a company. Whether it is a product, policy or initiative — our solutions are intended to promote digital togetherness.
Designing for purpose
Over the years, our company has not only transformed businesses for our clients, it has transformed itself too. We realised we needed to evolve from a digital agency that simply built products, to a digital partner that specialises in the digital innovation of companies and institutions. This means not only knowing how to build high-quality digital products, but how to do it creatively and with a business mindset. To take our clients to the next level, we now work for leaders who want to shape the future. This partnership is the new kind of entrepreneurship that is driving meaningful growth from within companies.
You must design for purpose. And the only thing that will work within a mid-large sized company is an impactful design that changes lives both in business and social terms (and sometimes within a larger context if you choose to spin-out a project). It is not enough to be technical, you need empathy to discover where the real value for the end-user is.
From our experience delivering value-driven end-to-end transformations, analysing the pain points will accelerate you to the first step on the digitisation roadmap by helping you to choose the best quality solutions. At the same time, repeating this process by asking users to provide feedback to the development team every step of the way, means you never lose sight of what drives innovation — the people. You also need to think about what the market will look like in ten years’ time and map out what steps you will need to take to get there, with the flexibility to respond to new developments.
Avoiding uniformity and technical debt
Innovation requires both dreamers and doers. Entrepreneurship from within, or from an external consultancy (dreamers) combined with an external product building team (doers) connects these worlds. The doers continually develop in small, quick steps — co-creating with the end-users by delving into the needs behind the demand so the product can grow with the user and flex with the digital strategy of the business. Teams should be small, close-knit and professional. This means they can get together and move forward quickly on complex issues for change-oriented companies. Smaller teams not only work with merit, ownership and accountability but also have the space to never stop asking why. And the conviction to push for more that comes from always experiencing a project from start to finish.
The alternative is companies racking up huge technical debt by simply using out-of-the-box solutions. Or by taking successful examples, often from competitors, and creating a similar product or the same type of service. The result is uniformity — and these solutions silo your operations, processes, and data. And it is data that is most important. We have spent 5 years investing heavily in quality architecture to ensure our clients can unlock the best insights and business opportunities from their data, whilst guaranteeing security and that they can remain digitally relevant in a competitive landscape.
The digital entrepreneurship trinity
The trinity needed to create digital entrepreneurship with our partners is the client, the end-user, and the business case. You only get a good product if everyone in the team understands all of these. That means our team working directly with each the product owner, the end-user, and the domain expert. Technology always leads back to man, so the human knowledge is just as essential and indispensable as the tech skills. By combining their wishes and needs with creative innovation, we make successes together.
In every design of ours, people come first; that leads to unique digital products and services with the perfect user experience. If you include people — both users and entrepreneurs — in such a process, you will not only get a better result, but the adaptation of innovations becomes much faster, and therefore growth becomes more rapid.
