The Key to Navigating a Recession is Innovation: Part One

Our friends at Gartner recently published a blog that identified 9 actions that organizations should take to effectively navigate a recession. Upon reviewing this piece, we recognized that a company’s ability to innovate is fundamental to the implementation of all 9 of these actions.

In this blog – the first of a three-part series – we will look at how innovation, and in particular Innovation_360 from Wazoku, enables a business to make the changes that Gartner recommends. The first cluster of three actions revolves around how a business manages resources and spends in a strategic manner.

#1: Trade-Offs

Gartner’s Advice: “Create a prioritized list of the resource trade-offs you will make in cost management and budgeting. Develop a clear narrative that explains your thinking and that you can communicate to stakeholders to build buy-in.”

By hosting all your innovation projects in one place, the Wazoku Platform offers comprehensive visibility to any user within your network. This helps build buy-in to the innovation process from the very beginning, regardless of whether your focus is resources or not.

In this example, you are dealing with resource trade-offs and ways to manage costs and budgeting. Our tried and tested Challenge Driven Innovation® framework allows you to easily identify inefficiencies and provides a roadmap for resolving them. One of our clients, Waitrose, was able to apply this to its operation, and make annual savings totalling £150k+ from simple, easy-to-implement changes.

#2: Cloud Migration

Gartner’s Advice: “Accelerate movement to the cloud as part of purposeful digitalization of critical business needs. This creates the potential to reduce the impact of rising energy costs and supports the movement to a nimbler adaptive organization.”

Digital transformation is one of the most common ways that businesses innovate. As the necessity of this is pushed to the forefront by recession concerns over energy costs and company agility, organizations need to know that they can trust the method being used.

In the past, Wazoku has helped Old Mutual manage digital transformation projects, accelerating the digitization process and allowing the business units to unlock the benefits of greater oversight and more connections.

#3: Workflows

Gartner’s Advice: “Radically challenge collaboration approaches, workflows and processes to make them faster, simpler, and more agile.”

Wazoku was founded on the idea that anyone, anywhere can be an innovator: given the right tools and the right problem to solve. Our platform allows organizations to prove that in real time, connecting users from throughout a supply chain with clearly defined problems that need solving or opportunities worth exploring.

Added to this capability, we manage the Wazoku Crowd, an always-on open talent network that connects businesses to experts from around the world. With this force multiplier, organizations can create a culture where innovation – both internal and external – is able to be used consistently. This supports the business in making processes faster, simpler, and more agile.

In this blog, we’ve focused on the first three key actions Gartner recommends a business takes in order to navigate a recession. We’ve outlined the advice given, provided a real-world context for it, and illustrated how Wazoku both can and has been used to implement these strategies in the past. Coming next, we look at Gartner’s second block of three key actions, which focuses on the securing of digital talent.

Discover all of our content related to Gartner’s recession advice by clicking here!