Tag: Digital Business Transformation

Last year, Google officially bid goodbye to the futuristic Google Glasses launched in 2013. 

It failed because of its clunky design, high cost, and customers’ concerns about data breaches and hacking. 

Amazon’s Fire Phone met a similar fate. The company launched the smartphone in 2014. However, it never gained popularity because of its bulky design, limited apps compared to Android and Apple, and unaffordable prices.

Both products failed because the companies did not fully understand the market and customer needs. Amazon, for example, underestimated the popularity of Google Play Store, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail. Customers could not access these popular apps, which became one of the main reasons for Fire Phone’s downfall.

Like Amazon and Google, many companies fail to see their innovations succeed. According to Harvard Business School, that number could be between 70% to 90%.

Failure in innovation could happen due to various reasons:

• Lack of practicality in ideas: The products were not designed properly, as in the case of Google Glass or Amazon Fire Phone. Google Glass was poorly designed, while Amazon Fire Phones were heavier than other smartphones. The product must address real-world needs and concerns for the idea to succeed. 

• Not understanding customer needs: A lack of research and understanding of customer needs could lead to building products that are not useful to customers.

• Lack of alignment with business objectives: Innovation cannot always happen in silos. After all, it involves the company’s resources, time, and money. It must align with the company’s overall objectives to deliver the desired outcomes.

• Not accounting risks: Most companies do not consider risks or unforeseen challenges while developing an innovative product. This could derail the plan and lead to early failures.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to always be this way. 

Innovation is not an impossible goal to achieve. At Inovar Tech, we call it the Art of Possible. It opens up a world of new possibilities for experimentation and growth.

To succeed, companies need a practical approach to building innovative products. 

Let me explain how it works.

Art of Possible – Bringing Practicality in Innovation

To build innovative products, companies must focus on solving real-world problems rather than building to demonstrate an innovative mindset.

This approach is called practical innovation.

Practical innovation is not just about developing new ideas. It is about turning those ideas into products that deliver tangible results. Innovation and practicality cannot function in silos. 

Practicality has to be baked into every step of innovation. 

Here are some ways to do it.

• Solve real-world problems

Do thorough research to understand the pain points of the customers. This will help you find solutions that will alleviate the customer’s problems. 

• Use multi-pronged approach

Don’t rely on a single approach to solve problems. For example, companies use a single tech stack to build products. A single tech stack could hinder innovation if it has limited features and does not evolve with time. 

Use a multi-pronged approach to consider multiple approaches to a problem. For example, multiple tech stacks provide more features and flexibility, making innovation easy.

There may not always be a correct answer, but a multi-pronged approach eliminates the assumption that there’s only one way to solve a problem. It encourages companies to find more solutions to solve problems and innovate. 

• Find the balance

Too much focus on creativity and innovation can pose several challenges. For example, complex interfaces and confusing navigation can lead to customer churn. Impractical products with no real-world use case can lead to wasted company resources and reputation damage. 

Find a balance between practicality and creativity to overcome these challenges. Define a clear goal, find multiple ways to achieve it, and choose the best solution after a thorough feasibility evaluation. 

• Take a customer-centric approach

Create detailed customer personas to understand the customers’ needs, behaviors, and pain points. Build products and features keeping these insights in mind. Once the product is ready, launch it to the most avid users for feedback. Conduct usability tests and customer surveys and seek reviews to identify areas of improvement. Implement their inputs to improve the product.

• Don’t forget the MVP

Don’t get distracted from the objective of building a practical product by including all shiny features. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with critical features and functionalities that solve real-world problems. Release it to the users to gather feedback and improve the product. This approach will accelerate the development cycle and save time on building products nobody wants. 

• Iterate always

Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and measure the metrics regularly. This will help you identify areas for improvement and iterate the product to achieve the business goals. Regular iterations will help keep pace with customer demands and stay innovative.

You must also collect feedback from customers and other stakeholders about the product, analyze it, and integrate the key takeaways to improve it. 

How To Decode The ‘Art of Possible’?

In a fast-paced business environment, balancing innovation and practicality can become challenging.

At Inovar, we understand this challenge well. That’s why we conduct workshops called the ‘Art of Possible’ to accelerate a company’s journey toward becoming a digital business.

In this workshop, we will walk you through our 4I framework: Inspire, Ideate, Innovate, and Integrate. 

In other words, through this workshop, we help you:

• Find inspiration for your digital innovation journey.
• Identify multiple opportunities to generate business ideas and capitalize on them.
• Build a roadmap and guide you through the innovation process.
• Brainstorm multiple strategies and implement the most viable to make the vision a reality.

From discovery to understanding challenges and conceptualizing innovative solutions, we will be with you throughout the process so that you can learn the impossible art of achieving practical innovation. 

To know more about our Art of Possible, contact us. 

The world is evolving at an ever-growing right to change. The rise of economies, emerging technologies such as IoT, and the commoditization of knowledge are driving changes in the way we work. While forcing businesses to reinvent business mottos and the methods, they use a creative design and human-centric solution approach.

Complex problem solving has emerged as the top skill in this list. Business models seek professionals with the ability to unpack the problems and successfully navigate to a solution that isn’t necessarily obvious to the naked eye. Design Thinking has come into force with a discipline that many believe, will help businesses to solve complex problems.

Where is this new wave of Design Thinking seed, when lined up against the traditional disciplines and definitions of design?

The Design Thinking approach is based on the type of problems being solved. Traditional design techniques focus largely on the 1^st and 2^nd orders of design. The first-order deals with graphic design and visual representation while the second-order deals with physical solutions and industrial designs like mobile apps.

The third and the fourth-order of design thinking leads to complex problems where experiential and strategic design comes into play. These complex problems need to address services and large-scale issues which require a deep understanding of the needs of the customers and deliver more value and successful solutions.

For many designers, this is a fundamental shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. To solve complex problems, designers tackle traditional and linear ways of thinking about the problems and find ways to solve them.

Design Thinking Model and Implementation

Design Thinking follows a six-step process. Embarking these steps into the businesses leads to embracing new situations and seeking profit growth opportunities in the market. Integrating solutions into the businesses through architecture and agile delivery ensures the successful incorporation of new products and services into business operations with a rapid rate of increase.

The six-step process used to solve real-time problems in the Design Thinking approach is

Prepare Stage: Designers get everything ready to start the design journey by understanding which problems are best suited to tackle using the Design Thinking process.

Discovery Phase: Designers focus on research and exploring the problems in more detail.

Definition Phase: Designers synthesize all the data and get insights, arrive at a validation point of view, and take it forward into ideation.

Develop Phase: Designers generate, concepts and rapid prototyping into test ideas.

Delivery Phase: In this stage, the prototypes are taken into the real world before refining and creating a final version of the product, that is ready for production.

Launch: Designers thoroughly know how the product or the solution is integrated into the existing operation, services, or product offerings of the businesses, and the customers, thus enabling the businesses to scale fast when required.

We at Inovar view Design Thinking as a deep-rooted approach to embark on resolving problems with tailored solutions that hold relevance for a wider scope of challenges than simply using the traditional design arena.