Mastering Innovation: A structured path to success

Innovation is the lifeblood of sustained business performance. Yet, despite its importance, many firms struggle to innovate effectively. Organisations often face challenges in innovating, and these challenges hinder a company's ability to bring new ideas to market efficiently and effectively. Our Structured Innovation approach at Credera offers a solution, providing a systematic approach to harness creativity and drive meaningful change.

This blog explores the challenges organisations face in driving growth and how a Structured Innovation approach can help overcome these obstacles to boost performance.

Key challenges in driving business growth

All organisations face challenges that hinder their ability to grow, adapt, and stay competitive, and unless they are overcome, they can limit a company's ability to stay viable. Let’s explore some of the most common hurdles and how they impact performance.

1. Misunderstanding user needs: One of the most significant challenges in innovation is accurately identifying and addressing the true needs of users. Organisations can often rely on unverified assumptions, or worst still, conflate user needs with their own desires, leading to products or services that miss the mark – this can be costly and waste precious time.

2. Falling in love with ideas: Failure to progress new ideas into tangible value is common. This constant ideation phase leads to wasted resources and missed opportunities, as companies never turn their ideas into reality.

3. Seeking perfection prematurely: The pursuit of perfection consumes time, so much time! Many companies struggle to bring new ideas to market quickly and efficiently, often getting fixated on an ideal solution, with the ambition of creating something pixel perfect rather than pursuing early feedback, iterating, and improving!

4. Persisting “ad-hoc” innovation: Firms that fail to make innovation a repeatable, measurable process miss the opportunity to minimise duplication and regret effort being duplicated. Pockets of ad-hoc innovation scattered through any company lacks a strategic focus, creating higher cost and duplication of effort. Without a structured approach, innovation efforts become disjointed and significantly less effective.

Our solution: Structured Innovation

To overcome these challenges, organisations need more than just inspiration - they need a structured, disciplined approach to innovation. When innovation is guided by a clear framework, it becomes a powerful tool for solving these common hurdles. A systematic process helps ensure that organisations focus on solving the right problems, quickly evaluate ideas, and avoid the trap of perfectionism. By treating innovation as a repeatable, measurable process, businesses can significantly reduce risk, drive efficiency, and bring ideas to market at a faster rate with greater confidence to create revenue opportunities.

Credera’s Structured Innovation approach

Our innovation approach helps organisations at every stage of the process, backed by our wide range of capabilities to ensure successful results.

1. Identify the right opportunities: We help organisations understand problems, uncover user needs, and pinpoint valuable opportunities . We do this through Problem Identification workshops, ensuring at least one of two things:

• An articulation of the problem that needs solving

• Group consensus on the problem

2. Ideate solutions: Once the opportunities are clear, we move to the ideation phase. This is a high-energy workshop with a team of subject matter experts from Credera and up to 40 employees from your organisation. This stage is about generating a range of ideas that could address the identified challenges. Using design thinking techniques, we generate potential ideas and create a backlog of innovative ideas ready for refinement.

3. Incubate promising solutions: After selecting the most promising ideas, it’s time to test, refine, and validate them through rapid prototyping and customer feedback. Our approach leans heavily on hypothesis testing (making it measurable) and feedback loops to ensure alignment with user needs and market expectations. We have a large Engineering practice that offers Proofs of Concept in AI, cloud, data, web, and mobile apps – along with prototyping in wireframes to quickly demonstrate feasibility early on.

4. Iterate and scale: With initial solutions tested, data gathered, and value recognised, the final phase involves turning prototypes into scalable products and services. Here, we focus on rapid scaled development, optimising product backlogs, and continuous improvement against a backbone of repeatable technology. Most importantly, this stage is about scaling the product to real-world users as quickly as possible to release the opportunity for the firm. Data-driven workshops help teams make informed decisions about next steps, ensuring sustainable and successful solutions.

Case Study: Transforming workforce engagement with mobile technology

To showcase how this structured approach works in practice, consider our work with Hilton Worldwide. Structured Innovation can be used for revenue creation, as well as improving employee experience. Hilton partnered with us to explore new ways to engage its global workforce through mobile technologies. They faced the challenge of improving employee engagement while considering diverse global needs.

For them, we tailored the approach starting with a focus on a rapid, focused, and time-bound process to prototype a solution in just three days. By involving Hilton’s team members early in the process, we were able to quickly validate ideas and gather real-time feedback. The result? A feature set that resonated with employees and a solid business case that Hilton could confidently pitch to their executive leadership for further implementation.

This case highlights the power of structured innovation, where creative ideation and rapid testing can lead to impactful, user-centred solutions that directly align with both business and user needs.

How Credera can help

By adopting Credera’s Structured Innovation approach, companies can avoid common pitfalls and bring new ideas to market more efficiently and effectively.

We understand the complexities of innovation and the challenges that companies face. Our structured approach combines design thinking with a systematic process to unlock creativity and drive meaningful change. Whether you're looking to identify new opportunities, generate innovative solutions, or scale successful ideas, our team has the capabilities and experience to guide you through every stage of the innovation process.

If you're ready to take your innovation efforts to the next level, we'd love to set up a conversation to share ideas and explore how we can help. Contact us today to get started on your innovation journey.

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