Innovation lies at the heart of progress and growth. The benefits of a successful innovation model that can be repeated for new product development offers an incredible competitive advantage for companies. However, successful innovation with big companies is on the decline. Per the Journal of Product Innovation & Management, up to 49% of innovations are not successful. In the age of big data and advanced digital capabilities, it’s essential to ask why.
Systematic Obstructions to Innovation
There are several systematic obstructions that impede today’s innovations. The inundation of the “new and improved” label is proof of the failure of innovations to deliver their promised benefit. Thus, consumers and business customers alike have grown skeptical of the validity behind the term “innovation.”
Conversely, products that are in fact innovative cannot succeed if they require too great a behavioral change from consumers. The search for greater value stops at any sign of “heavy lifting.”
Product innovations also fail today because they take too much time to reach the market. In an environment of rapidly changing consumer needs, time can be extremely costly to product designers. Currently, most new products take one to three years to reach the market. By the time those products are available to consumers, the product has likely lost its potential to meet current customer needs.
Product Development Challenges in the Era of Big Data
Organizations should seek to understand the challenges that exist in bringing new products to market.
Ninety six percent of executives attribute a lack of collaboration as the source of workplace failure, per Salesforce. Teamwork has long been understood as the driver behind innovation. Today’s workforce is not equipped to achieve the level of teamwork and collaboration required for true innovation. Stakeholders have never been more geographically dispersed, which prevents the fluid collaboration needed to deliver innovative outcomes.
Secondly, big data poses just as many challenges as it does solutions. The amount of information available to drive innovative choices continues to intensify, which only increases the challenge of making sense of the data.
Finally, one of the greatest challenges to achieving innovation is rooted in the failure by business to understand the limitations of their conventional decision-making models. Innovation problems are filled with complexities and new product solutions tend to tackle those problems with an equal force of complexity. True innovators should seek efficiencies in problem-solving that deliver simple and universally applicable forms – minimizing production expenses and time to market.
Attaining the level of simplicity required for such efficiency is no easy task. Responsibility is placed on the business innovators to move beyond traditional development processes and uncover more efficient solutions.
Harnessing Infopresence to Drive Innovation
Although the challenges to achieving innovation may seem daunting, there is a growing workplace trend that is poised to help business leaders tackle these problems head on.
Infopresence is an emergent term recognizing that business decisions are driven by data and achieved through collaboration. Infopresence refers to the collective experiences of teams being physically and cognitively immersed in critical data and content.
The experience provided by Infopresence has overhauled the ways groups approach decision-making. Teams in the same location or across offices, can benefit from being surrounded and engaged with big data – fostering a collaborative environment for improved decision-making and innovations.
Data from multiple devices is made visible and sharable across surfaces that surround the group. The immersive and fluid access to data and content, facilitates the groups collective ability to see, feel, and think about the data presented in new, insightful ways.
The immersive and spatial visualization of previously siloed data allows teams to derive meaning from the large amounts of undifferentiated data. As a result, development processes become streamlined – speeding up solution discovery and leading to innovations that reach the market while consumer demands are still relevant.
The Ultimate Competitive Advantage
Boosting efficiencies and bringing products to market quickly will undoubtedly result in tangible, monetary benefits. Infopresence is the experience that offers companies the competitive advantage required of today’s innovative processes.
By immersing teams in critical data and providing a dynamic environment for collaboration, reliable processes will emerge for efficient and successful product development. Infopresence is the essential experience that ensures an ongoing competitive advantage for business.
About the Author
David Kung is VP Product Strategy for Oblong Industries. He is responsible for Oblong’s product roadmap and strategy. Prior to Oblong, he served as VP, Creative Director at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Online. At Creative Artists Agency, David specialized in emerging technology for clients including Coca-Cola, Sprint, and Hasbro. Previously, David developed enhanced television programs as a Disney Imagineer and was a design lead with Art Technology Group. He holds degrees from MIT’s School of Architecture and the MIT Media Lab.
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