Innovating Outside of the Hub: 3 Ways Innovation Can Impact The Wider Organisation
While “innovation” may be one of the most overused terms of the decade, innovation hubs are nothing new. Brands like Nokia and Philips set up innovation hubs back in 1925, creating products celebrated for their award-winning designs and contribution to modern technology. The C programming language that is still used by millions of programmers worldwide? You can thank Nokia and its work with Bell Labs for sparking this back in 1972.
Over the years, the rapid evolution of technology has increased the visibility of innovation hubs within companies. And as the emphasis on innovation grows, we’ve seen a marked shift in how these hubs operate. No longer are innovation hubs siloed off, working solely on developing apps, coding new programming or completing technology projects.The most impactful innovation hubs of 2019 are fully integrated into their organisations and are empowered to play a fundamental role in the company’s culture and mindset.
Improving Ways of Working
It’s easy to get stuck and hindered by internal processes and ways of working, especially when your company is using systems that have been in place for decades. And while companies across the globe are moving quickly to ensure their products and services are evolving with customer needs, they’re often quite far behind in re-working how they bring these products to life. Many teams don’t even know what’s possible in terms of how they could improve their collaboration and speed to market.
So when an innovation hub comes in and immediately exposes the wider team to new (and much faster) ways of working, this can have a big impact for the company. These hubs are built to operate differently and use tools and methods that some traditional companies have never even heard of. And while the wider team may not adopt Slack, Zoom or an Agile methodology right away, they often tweak their current processes to take learnings from what they’ve seen. They’re inspired to seek out new ways to get things done and to rethink the status quo of how they work together every day.
Spurring Ideation
The smartest innovation hubs operate under the assumption that the best ideas can come from anywhere in the company and view themselves as facilitators, not keepers, of ideas.
There has been a rise in the creative ways in which innovation hubs are spurring innovative thinking within the wider teams. These include launching internal hackathons, company-wide contests and awards, or holding employee Inspiration Days with external speakers who share stories from different roles and industries.
These events help teams break away from the day to day, collaborate with people they don’t normally work with, apply new ways of thinking, and inject creativity into every role. And in shaking people out of their status quo, they often also lead to true innovation for a company.
Take Westpac’s HackTheFuture2017 Hackathon. James Lee, an employee who had never even heard of the term hackathon prior to entering, led his team to victory and came up with the idea for an app that is helping consumers take better inventory of their belongings.
Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of working with James and the Westpac team to build the app, and iterate on the idea to develop a product that will ultimately shape the company’s insurance offering, making it more human and customer centric.
Using Data to Understand the Customer
Innovation Hubs can play an important role in bringing the entire company closer to their customers. By analysing data and making it actionable, the hub can provide a clear direction and tools, for the rest of the company to execute against a customer centric mission.
SKYCITY’s Innovation Hub did just that when we partnered with them in 2017. We worked with the innovation team to sift through data from a customer survey and interview customers directly to get to the bottom of what their guest wanted. From all the numbers and anecdotes, we determined that the biggest need for the business was to simplify the guest experience across the restaurant, conference venue, hotel and property. We found that guests were put off by things like, having to order room service by the phone or cueing to pay at one of the restaurants, and that these inconveniences were taking away from the experience and their perception of the brand.
To help them solve for this we created the ultimate customer app that solved for each of the pain points we found in the data. The app allowed guests to order room service from their phones, pay at the restaurant, save their dietary preferences, find their way around the property and more.
And while we were developing the strategy for the app, we also worked with the innovation team to collect anecdotal data by spending busy nights in the hotel kitchen, taking phone orders, watching the food being prepared, and running them up ourselves. This information gave us insight into staff challenges as well as guests, which helped us ensure our solutions were easy to execute for the team on the ground.
The end result was an interactive staff dashboard that gave team members more insight into their guests preferences and past orders, while also simplifying and automating processes of their jobs.
In 2019, it’s a given that innovation hubs are great incubators for tech development and bringing products to market fast. But at Roam, we think the real value of these hubs come from letting them out of their silo. When an innovation hub is championed and supported, they’re able to fundamentally alter the experience for every employee while improving the products and shaping the roadmap of the company.
