IT driven innovation

IT becomes a major driver behind increased speed and results from innovation. With manufacturing becoming a commodity and marketing increasingly hard and expensive many organizations are turning to innovation as the new revenue source. Innovation can create higher valued products from existing manufacturing capacity and simplifies marketing through improved experience.

IT greatly speeds up innovation and increases the effect in four areas:

• Measurement. How do you measure the current state of affairs?
• Experimentation. What is the value of this idea?
• Sharing. Who can benefit from my new knowledge?
• Replication. How to scale the new innovation throughout the organization?

These areas are important as separate activities and most organizations do one or several of them. They reinforce each other further magnifying the effect from each area. Improving measurements gives you better data easier and cheaper. Experimentation thrives on faster and cheaper measurements. Sharing those results further increases the value across the organization. Replicating successful business innovation enables faster scale ups and shorter time to market.

Measurements is radically improving the way we collect data and sort it. Nano data from click streams, emails, discussion boards, web trends, CRM, supply-chain, etc. Business intelligence is tapping into this area; needs to tap into the very bits and pieces of the nano data and make it available to the organization.

Experimentation through IT tools based on improved measurements. Measurement both to feed into the idea generation and to evaluate the effect from different ideas. Retailers can use IT to efficiently instruct different displays and then use improved nano measurements to follow up sales and profitability. New business models can use IT to track the consumption of goods and services through RFID tags on individual levels.

Sharing the results of experiments and the measures improves others to innovate. They don't have to invent the wheel again, can get the exact data measure setup, sharing ideas that for some reason failed (sometimes the most important aspect as failures seldom gets documented and less often shared).

Replication of innovations once they've been evaluated and proven is the key to successfully reap the benefits. The first three areas help organizations find and nurture new innovations. IT makes it possible to take that innovation and roll it out quickly and seamlessly. IT drives replication of business processes themselves. An example is how a bank is replicating a new loan process across all branches, a new customer return policy, displaying new food products in a retail store. Measurements enable the follow up of how well replicated the innovation is.

Collection of nano-level data is the foundation for IT driven innovation and replicating the innovation across the organization enables fast time to market.