Innovation: Changing what you do? Or just how you do it?

Ant Morse, Head of Innovation and Account Engagement at Virgin Media O₂ Business, considers the relationship between business challenges, technology and the need to innovate.

Innovation tends to mean different things to different people. There’s the invention of new technology that can disrupt an existing market. There’s radical innovation, involving technological breakthroughs that can create a whole new market. And then there’s the significant improvement of an existing product in a market that’s already established.

However, whilst it’s often technology that sparks or enables innovation, I believe that technology alone isn’t the answer — and that only organisations with the right culture or mindset can expect to be truly innovative. The innovators are the ones who look at a business process or workflow, try something new, and are prepared to accept failure if it leads to lessons learned or greater understanding. It’s about identifying new use cases for developing technologies, rather than simply adopting the technologies themselves.

The development of 5G connectivity is a good example. When the roadmap towards 5G implementation was initially laid out, businesses talked about the benefits in terms of the increased speeds, low latency and reduced power requirements. Valuable as these benefits are, the real value comes from understanding how these technologies can be matched to improving workflows and processes; enhancing productivity, realising efficiencies, enhancing health and safety, and in some cases delivering entirely new revenue streams.

At Virgin Media O₂ Business, we have a customer innovation board that helps organisations of all sizes, across a broad range of sectors, to identify specific use cases for new and emerging technologies. When we talked with customers about 5G, we identified 176 separate and unique use cases that the technology might deliver. However, and here’s the really interesting part, when we looked into them individually, fewer than ten actually required 5G connectivity to deliver immediate improvements. All the rest could be achieved using existing and well-established technologies.

If we want to define innovation then, we need to consider it more as a mindset. Ask, “what if?” and challenge existing processes with “why?”. As you embrace each open question, identifying the challenges that you hope technology will solve one day, sometimes you’ll find that the technology is already there.

Innovation has developed from ’nice to do’ to ‘essential requirement’ as a result of three competing pressures:

1. The customer wants and expects more - they know what they want, and they expect you to be present in their spaces, not the other way around. If you can’t be there for them then someone else can.
2. The employees want and expect more - they have witnessed that flexible and remote working is possible, and many of them like it. What are you doing to implement the skills your business needs, and to retain your best talent?
3. The board wants and expects more - and you need the team, as well as the supply chain that can help you.

This pressure to innovate has motivated many organisations to form innovation or technical advisory boards. However, if we consider that innovation is a mindset, maybe we should encourage it across the organisation? Build it in to a culture that become everyone’s responsibility, providing opportunities to capture those ideas, the “what if’s” from people who will look at a problem from a different perspective.

I often suggest that a good starting point is to consider the following questions:

• What change is impacting your industry?
• What challenges do your organisation need to overcome?
• What does your organisation want to achieve?

The sweet spot is where technology can enable what the business wants to achieve. That’s true innovation.

Virgin Media O₂ Business supports innovative organisations to implement the technology solutions optimised for our network. We want you to innovate in a way that is deliverable, and that maximises the effectiveness of the technology at hand, and the efficiency of our network.

So what’s your problem: Employee engagement? Customer satisfaction? Health and safety? Return to the office? A coffee might be all that’s needed to identify an innovative solution. You can message me on http://www.linkedin.com/in/antmorse