It is said that the more you know, the more that you can do with what you know. That’s why using research to breed innovation is essential for your business.
A corporate Research & Development department is an extremely important resource, but they typically tend to focus on near-term and short-term opportunities: The day to day improvements, the launch of a new product, the “low-hanging” fruit, as it were. A true research strategy involves a long-term approach and commitment to understanding the ways your market will change over time. In other words, putting research into practice means looking into the future, well beyond your current business model, to find new ways to impact slow and steady growth. This may require road-mapping your business according to new ideas, expert projections, and sometimes even major paradigm shifts.
Unfortunately, research such as this can be both expensive and difficult to perform. Many companies in this economy have been forced to cut spending in every department, and usually one of the first to be affected is the research team. However, a shortsighted decision to save money now by axing research, may truly hurt your business in the long run.
Research does not have to be a huge expense, though. Customer Feedback is an excellent way to gather information, discover trends, and predict the future of your industry. Managed efficiently, it can provide an enormous competitive advantage. By staying in touch with your customers’ wants and needs, you can find out a great deal of knowledge that can be practically applied to your business.
Acquiring feedback can be as simple as launching a web-based tool like Flagpole. Flagpole deploys quickly and creates an easy-to-use sharing ground for ideas and suggestions from your customers. You can directly ask them all the questions you need answered by issuing challenges. Your employees can also participate by submitting their own answers and ideas, and by voting and commenting on those received from your customers. This will begin to build strong and meaningful interactions between your company and your user community. What you gather from these interactions and ideas will undoubtedly help you predict where your market is heading, and where your company needs to be to stay ahead.
To learn more about Flagpole, or to sign up for a completely free version, visit: http://www.flagpole-software.com/price.htm
Stakeholders in your Organization Have Great Ideas – Just Ask Them!
Published December 29, 2009 Best practices , Business Innovation , Collaboration & Communities , Crowd-Sourcing , Feedback , Idea Management , Open Innovation , Suggestion Box Leave a CommentTags: Audience, Cloud, Commenting, Crowd-Sourcing, Customer, Employee, Feedback, Idea box, Idea Message Board, lean, Process Improvement, Projects, Voting, Waste reduction, Web, web 2.0
It has been said that 80% of the solutions to your company’s problems already exist in the minds of your employees. Why not ask them?
By implementing a friendly, easy-to-use and interactive space on the web for collecting and nurturing ideas, you will realize a whole new way of solving issues. Who better to offer ideas and suggestions to your company’s most perplexing issues than the folks who work with your organization and product every day? Employees, Customers, Business Partners, Suppliers, Experts – they all have great ideas and they will love telling you (and each other) about them. It’s called “crowd-sourcing your innovation” and it works!
Flagpole Software can help you solicit suggestions and ideas for new products, business improvements, better processes, cost savings, waste reduction, new markets/projects, and just about any other type of innovation, incremental or break-through, your company needs to find. Additionally, by allowing your users to comment and vote on each other’s submissions, you can help reduce the resources needed to find and review new bits of innovation.
Get in touch with Flagpole today and try our new cost-effective web solutions for crowd-sourcing ideas. We even have a free version that can get you started in minutes.