Enter the innovation cycle!

If you haven’t felt the pressure to innovate, perhaps you are missing out. Missing what? That agile cloud-native start-ups are constantly innovating, driving changes every day. That your competition is innovating to create more compelling customer experiences. You probably already know you need to innovate and innovate faster just to keep up.

 Want to get started with innovation? Ask yourself why you want to generate innovation.

At Axway, we chose to focus on innovation to help our customers innovate. This gives innovation a purpose and a clear result: customer success.

For a couple of decades, we’ve been helping our customers renew and transform their capabilities to drive success, thanks to our hybrid integration platform. While the value of our platform has been well understood by our teams and our customers, its power of innovation has often been underestimated.

That is one of the reasons we created an innovation lab, the “Griffin Lab,” more than a year ago.

Like any innovation lab, it is the place where you can witness innovations, showing tangible examples. Our customers, our partners, and even our colleagues visit the lab and can witness several innovative prototypes we have worked on.

This always gives them new ideas. Over time, we use these ideas to create new innovations or to enhance our prototypes. These are then used to show innovation to peers and our next visitors. It is a virtuous cycle that always brings more people into innovation.

If fact this cycle and the three phases may apply in any company that wants to innovate quickly.

• The “Create” phase requires technical as well as design and customer experience skills. You have to create quickly a draft of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with a great customer experience. “Quickly” means it shouldn’t take months, but days. The power of innovation is linked to the speed of it.
  To prototype innovations, you need the right tool to start quickly and connect things together easily: a SaaS or hybrid integration platform is definitely a great tool for that.
• The “Show” is about inspiring storytelling presenting what has been created and what value it brings. In the Griffin Lab, we have many prototypes involving new customer use-cases in various industries, and new technology such as IoT, Vocal assistants, Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, mobile phones’ newest capabilities, various Cloud apps, etc. This is often proof for the audience that innovation is reachable by all.
  This is probably the best step to enter the cycle. So if you want to visit a lab, feel free to register for a visit here, wherever you are from, as we also do virtual tours.
• “Think” is an exercise where everyone can contribute. In a true innovation lab, there are no bad ideas. That doesn’t mean you will try to innovate on every idea – good or bad – but it does mean you should create an environment where ideas are welcome and encouraged.

How can you do that? We’ve recently strengthened the “think” part of the cycle. We added a new service to our Griffin Lab so we can further think of these ideas in “design thinking” workshops. During these workshops, we use various techniques to ideate and then shape the idea to something attractive, viable, and doable by asking the right questions.

So if you also want to be an agent of change, consider jumping into this cycle soon!

And if you’re looking for inspiration to define your next innovation, watch this inspirational and instructive TEDxTalk by Guy Kawasaki about “the art of innovation”

Read more about the recent work of the Griffin Lab’s on the Axway Developer blog.