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For companies that don’t yet have a dedicated head of innovation, and even for some that do, thinking about innovation means thinking about budget.
How can they get buy-in for the expenses required to support the planning, research, setup, testing and evaluation that goes into pursuing an innovation strategy?
Bolster your case for innovation with these three concrete ways to cut costs and make your innovation process more efficient while simultaneously increasing innovation ROI.
1. Crowdsource Innovation
When it comes to taking on new innovation endeavors — whether expanding a product’s capabilities, creating a new market or entering a new market — companies should look inward for inspiration.
Including employees from all levels and departments as part of a clearly defined innovation strategy invites new perspectives and can help the business capitalize on existing resources and without incurring additional costs.
Read more: How to Identify and Develop Your Next Big Innovation
2. Use the Power of Big Data
Innovation doesn’t have to be inherently expensive. There may be hidden value in your existing products and services that can be leveraged to drive innovation in a way that involves minimal risk. Identifying these areas requires a closer look at available data. The answer to advancing innovation while also cutting costs may already be at your fingertips.
According to Fred McClimans at Futurum Research + Analysis, “The key to enabling innovation in this (or any) type of environment lies in having the right data-oriented corporate mindset and preserving and encouraging agility at all costs,” he says. “Innovations focused on streamlining processes and reducing costs can work, including looking to consumption-based IT services, but only with the right data to inform decisions and the ability to rapidly execute.”
3. Centralize the Proof-of-Concept Process
When you know what challenge you want to solve or opportunity you want to seize, it is time to run a proof-of-concept (PoC) to find the right technology partner. At this point, costs can be significantly mitigated by centralizing the PoC process on one cloud-based platform.
Having one tool to discover, test and evaluate available software vendors saves companies the costs of hours of research and evaluation, plus the setup costs of building testing environments.
Using a PoC platform that allows you to test multiple technologies on the same environment saves even more, by negating the need to build a separate testing environment for each vendor.
How to Run a Proof-of-Concept
in the 21st Century
Spend Smart to Fund Innovation
For some companies, the challenge is less about how to cut costs and more about how to spend smart.
With the right strategy in place, you can reduce innovation costs while still keeping your company at the forefront of your industry.
Go to p. 22 of our 2018 Benchmark Report for more on How to Spend Smart
Look toward your network for crowdsourcing solutions, see what new ideas can be gleaned from existing data and bring your entire PoC process onto one platform.
