What drives innovation?

The premise that innovation drives business growth is undeniable. Yet as consumer demands change, businesses must quickly respond or risk losing market share.

Why is this important? Because we are living at a time of unprecedented changes in market demand, that in turn, forces manufacturing organizations to deliver innovation at an ever-accelerating pace. To address this, modern markets require innovation to be delivered continuously.

Continuous innovation: Is that even possible?

The world is filled with innovation-driving talent. People that seem to have a crystal ball into the future to see what market needs are even before the market knows it. However even the best and brightest individuals can’t maintain delivering innovation at the pace businesses require to stay on top.

While this seems daunting, the solution is in fact quite simple. To deliver innovation continuously, teams must collaborate. They must come together around a shared idea, challenge or question to interactively explore possibilities and think differently about how to approach them.

Here’s the catch. To be effective, collaboration must be inclusive and involve cross-functional teams. Why? Because business functions like Research & Development, Sales & Marketing, Engineering, Legal and Operations must be tightly connected. An idea that seems promising by one department could benefit from the feedback from other groups and be further improved.

In short, collaboration means bringing teams together, so projects unfold as a collective enterprise rather than a series of tasks divided among different teams. Developing effective collaboration processes brings a considerable advantage in an organization’s ability to evaluate new ideas and turn the best of them into products, services or experiences delivered to market.

The technological challenge of collaboration

If collaboration is an essential component to innovation, why is it such a challenge to deliver? First, it must be a priority of management to facilitate cross-team engagement. Second, the appropriate technology solution needs to be available to facilitate it.

The second challenge is often a sticking point. That’s because, regardless of the encouragement from management to work collaboratively, teams may lack the basic functionality to do so. As business technologies have evolved, they have become increasingly specialized to serve a particular business function. Teams from across the enterprise all operate in different, specialized environments, making it difficult to share current information with other departments.

A platform for inclusive collaboration

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a collaborative innovation platform that provides organizations with an entirely new way of doing business. It enables social and structured collaboration across all business functions to streamline the development and delivery of innovation. It does this by providing an inclusive, cloud-based environment where teams from across the globe come together to share ideas and information in real-time. The platform connects people, ideas, data, and processes together in a single environment. This enables teams to share insights and contribute throughout the innovation process.

What’s in it for me?

Each team participating in the innovation process is able to recognize gains that are unique to their operational needs. Here are a few examples of how individual teams are able to work together to support the sustainable delivery of innovation.

Human Resources

• Engage with technical and business teams to identify the skill profiles required as operations grow.
• Deliver and track training and certification curricula.
• Establish communities to communicate HR policies and share documentation.

Finance

• Validate go-to-market plans against revenue goals and expectations.
• Build financial and organizational models supporting business needs.
• Communicate cash flow and financing requirements to support expansion models and minimize risk.

Legal Department

• Recognize and address potential regulatory and patent compliance issues during the planning phase of a project.
• Work with development teams to identify and protect intellectual property.
• Establish and share contractual frameworks that meet the evolving business need of all departments.

Sales &Marketing

• Provide market research and customer insights to help steer business strategy and product development.
• Initiate the creation of go-to-market content during early stages of development.
• Use 3D designs to visually communicate product value and provide differentiating customer experiences.

Operations

• Determine what partners, technologies or processes are necessary to achieve goals.
• Connect with stakeholders to validate expectations and maintain agility during project launch.
• Coordinate and track the execution of new strategies.

Research & Development

• Communicate product ideas that support business growth.
• Validate product requirements and technical feasibility.
• Determine development costs and timelines.

Leading the charge for innovation

As a business, you must move forward, but this path is seldom a straight line. To be responsive to changing market conditions, your organization must break through functional silos. By working together on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, teams come together to develop and execute innovative strategies that give their business a competitive edge.

Learn more about Inclusive Collaboration and other leading industry trends that deliver transformational product and business innovation.

Read more about the advantages of Inclusive Collaboration on the 3D Perspectives blog.