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The Key to Navigating a Recession is Innovation: Part Three

By Michael Watkins

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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 last of a three-part series – we’ll look at how innovation, and in particular Innovation_360 from Wazoku, enables a business to make the changes that Gartner recommends. The third and final cluster of three actions revolves around how a business needs to identify initiatives to pursue and accelerate those which are fundamental to a prosperous future.

#1: Customer and Employee Vision

Gartner’s Advice: “Reimagine your customer and employee value propositions to accelerate the requisite digital investments.”

It is difficult to know exactly what your customers want or need from you without asking them directly. With the Wazoku Platform, you can connect and engage with people in your customer community, receiving insights that will more accurately inform any new value proposition you make.

Why play a guessing game with your customers when you can source valuable suggestions and solutions from them directly?

#2: Predictive and Autonomous

Gartner’s Advice: “Invest in predictive and autonomous digital projects that make your organization faster and leaner, including in its decision making.”

Businesses that wish to effectively innovate need a management platform in order to drive consistent value. With the Scouting_360 capabilities of our platform, companies can scan the horizon for available tech while also creating meaningful connections that make digitization easier.

Starting on this sooner rather than later allows a company to reap the benefits of a faster, leaner organization more quickly: it’s something that sets you up for more robust decision-making at the earliest possible time

#3: Digital Metrics

Gartner’s Advice: “Narrow the metrics you use to measure digital initiatives and monitor their progress to ensure you focus on the few that align to outcomes.”

With the launch of our new Advanced Analytics, Wazoku offers businesses the opportunity to view all their innovation data in one place. With configurable metrics and dashboards, an organization has complete control over the data reporting that it needs at any given time.

Through our Challenge Driven Innovation® framework, everything you do with Wazoku is aligned to the strategic goals of your organization. This combined functionality means that you can use data to drive change more efficiently than ever before.

In this blog, we’ve focused on the last 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.

Over the course of this series, we’ve delved a little deeper into how a company can manage resources, secure the right digital talent, and pursue initiatives in the face of a looming recession. In this small guide, we have highlighted the key learnings from these nine pieces of advice, which should provide a roadmap on what you need to do and how Wazoku can help you to make it happen.

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

By Michael Watkins

Michael is Wazoku's Product and Brand Marketing lead. Away from the office, he's our resident film buff, so if you want some recommendations for a night in front of Netflix or a trip to your local cinema, get in touch with him!