How do you innovate to drive business outcomes?
To be able to reach business outcomes, innovation is a great route to take. There may be many other ways to achieve business outcomes, however in the 2nd AWS session I attended online, innovation was their key to achieve business outcomes. This post will concisely discuss AWS’s strategy for different ways to innovate.
1. Tailor the strategy to fit the needs of the business outcome.
· There has to be an alignment with the business goals essentially which will then be able to support a business outcome.
2. Experimentation is a MUST.
· Being able to go through a trial and error phase where you can try out different ideas is beneficial to find out what works and what doesn’t. This will help for future reference.
3. Think of the process as a journey not just a destination.
· The outcome to be achieved cannot be thought of in isolation, there needs to be a roadmap or plan which is the journey towards the destination.
Automation refers to the automatic equipment or technology used to improve or speed up manual processes. Automation uses intelligent systems to automate away fewer valuable tasks and procedures to save time and create capacity for more valuable work. This kind of innovation will help keep organization at the forefront of technologic advances and gain a competitive advantage.
Enrichment in terms of innovation could be adding more features to an existing product or service. This could be something that adds more functionality or better functionality which can in turn result in more value. An example could be taking a notification system which provides basic updates but innovating by adding triggers for when certain types of notifications should appear and who they should be sent to.
Lastly, differentiating is another method of innovation. This would involve focusing on efforts to create and differentiate from other products and services being offered by competitors. Differentiation is a good way to disrupt the competitors and help the company to revamp or re-align its technologies.
I hope this gave you a high-level idea on what I learnt in this session and the different ways AWS innovates for business outcomes.
