Insights

5 ways innovation can lead to digital transparency

Kuruvilla Mathew, Chief Innovation Architect, UST

Innovation involves exploring and applying new technologies to help businesses improve their processes and overcome problems. The process involves several phases, ranging from digitizing to optimizing operations innovatively. Digitizing internal operations means doing better, finding new ways to engage users, and bringing new products and services to market faster and cheaper. Organizations open to innovation are growing at a brisk pace, but organizations that adopt innovation by putting empathy first are future-ready.

Progressive organizations must consider human behavior when conceiving, designing, and building new solutions. Empathy-first design is about understanding the needs, habits, motivations, and emotions of the people we are designing for and moving forward with those in mind. A digital innovation process that blends advanced technologies with usefulness rather than usability enables organizations to address real human needs.

Disruptions abound in the changing market conditions. Digital innovation platforms pave a faster path to transform your innovative new ideas into winning applications. Innovation labs act as incubators within enterprises to provide a fast lane through the business to speed discussions and deliver applications that tie into digital innovation initiatives. But speeding end-to-end results requires the right people, process, and platform. Let's take a deeper look into this process.

Understanding innovation

Innovation refers to applying advanced technology to solve existing business problems. Businesses know that they need to transform, innovate, and adopt new technology to stay competitive in today's evolving marketplace. They look for new ways to tackle challenges.

Innovation entails:

• Developing a new technology strategy in an existing business context
• Choosing to adopt and implement new software or platforms
• Deciding to evolve from analog to digital processes

Benefits of innovation:

• Streamlines business processes with automation, SaaS, and other integrated technology solutions
• Enhances efficiency and productivity
• Enables cost savings, improves ROI, and boosts revenue
• Helps create more engaged employees
• Helps organizations stay ahead of the competition and customer expectations

Understanding the process of innovation-How it can lead to digital transparency

Build for humans using an empathy-first design

Organizations are poised for technology adoption and change. They are looking for advanced solutions from their technology partners. They want to grow at scale without losing any more time. But simply arming them with new technologies is not the solution. We need to understand what problems we want to solve. We need to challenge the brief, dig deep and find out the big-picture. We need to understand what the people - employees and customers- want. This is where innovation truly comes into play.

We know technology plays a larger-than-ever role in our lives now, but that also means we need to be more mindful of the transformative solutions we design. The key is to channel our technology expertise into experiences that enhance, rather than inhibit, the flow of daily life. Understanding people's challenges and motivations will help us create an empathy-first design for lasting digital transformation.

Focus on the core of the problem, not its symptoms

Digital transformation projects often fail because teams have led with partially understood or misunderstood problems. When innovation is bred organically, organizations can expect results. Work with experts from diverse backgrounds who apply empathy-first design, digital-born innovation models, and technology prowess to focus on problem-solving. These technology transformation experts want to understand the entire ecosystem—the nature of problems, the context, economics, competition, and the advantages before developing a solution.

The process starts with understanding the struggles and challenges. It involves looking at multiple problem areas that need to be addressed, including budgets, resources, time, and bandwidth. Innovation labs then run ideation exercises and hackathons to develop prototypes. The unique approach involves applying design thinking principles to practical ideas, which lead to solutions bred with the best-in-class innovative technologies. These design techniques and engineering methods provide human empathy engineered designs. Down the road, they evolve to accelerate pilots and scale as the initiative expands to add more capabilities.

Focus on cutting-edge solutions that enhance life and work experiences

Technology transformation experts offer several capabilities to accelerate customer-centric innovation. They look at the lack of capabilities on the client-side that could be plagued with inefficiencies, lack of accountability, or cost overruns, for example. Their work with their partners and a network of startups and mature companies, all scale-ready and enterprise relevant, offer a stack of cutting-edge solutions. These encompass the fields of digital health, predictive retail and healthcare capabilities, IoT, testing, and more. Together, they help develop innovative solutions to solve existing business problems and help organizations transform.

Focus on usefulness, not just usability

The goal is to drive change by creating useful solutions. New technologies are developed every day, and many of them have become an integral part of our lives due to their sheer usefulness. These are the digital transformations that change the way we live and work. Truly useful innovation is designed to address real human needs. Usability is important, but with technology looming ever-larger in daily life, usefulness must be the number one consideration for technology transformation experts.

Apply the innovation lifecycle method

Digital innovation is constant through all phases of a project and beyond. The innovation lifecycle starts with the idea that focuses on a problem and seeks to solve it. The next steps involve structuring a process, forming valuable networks, and making the most of one's intellectual property to bring the idea to the market at the end. True innovators utilize an empathy-first design approach that combines human-centric design with anthropologists throughout the innovation life cycle. They customize this method to best fit each organization's culture and develop unique strategies for their digital transformation journey.

The UST differentiator: Empathy-first design

UST's model is built around the empathy-first approach, called Innovation Assurance. Our goal is to provide a truly end-to-end innovation assurance for our customers. Along with business problems, the process involves capturing what people think, feel, hear and do. Empathy-first design is a mindset shift but a highly effective one. UST innovators do a time-and-motion study and apply storytelling techniques to visualize the problem from several perspectives using dioramas, graphic novels, and creative animations. The Innovation Hub offers an innovation architecture with several sub-capabilities that accelerate innovation for organizations.

As a technology transformation company , we focus on the problem and not the symptoms of the problem. We determine the underlying issues and solutions from the end user's point of view to develop solutions that align with the client's business and enhance the ecosystem. Instead of just technological innovations, we look at the business model and opportunities for new revenues to bring distinct advantages to our clients.

To learn more about how our innovation ecosystem can supercharge your vision, visit Innovation Ecosystem | UST.