Guides to Innovation at Scale: Process Improvement

When people think about the term ‘Innovation’, they often lead to the big and the bold. They imagine it as being once-in-a-lifetime ideas, generated from scratch that turn industries on their head overnight

Occasionally, these revolutionary moments do come along. Far more regularly incremental changes, made to existing processes, deliver surprisingly effective results. When people in an organization focus on how to make their jobs more efficient, the potential upsides for the business are infinite.

At Wazoku, we’ve found that our Challenge-Driven Methodology allows businesses to focus their innovation targets on any aim they may have. This way of managing innovation efforts can be customized to any organization. By running Challenges that are focused on a particular process, the ideas generated are more aligned to those objectives – making their outcomes more beneficial.

In this guide, we’re going to look at some of the reasons for enacting change in this way. We’ll also discuss how organizations are already doing this and share some of the success stories that we at Wazoku have helped businesses achieve over the years.

Reasons for Improving Process:

In our experience, the reasons for improving processes fall into one of the following categories:

• Competitive Advantage: businesses that canvas employees who may use the products or services of a competitor gain a better understanding of the shortcomings of its offering. In this way, a company can increase its competitive advantage by fixing these issues.

• Time to Market: a company that manufactures its own products can find incremental ways of improving this process. In doing so, new products can get to market at a quicker rate than before.

• Waste Reduction: by improving processes, organizations can eliminate wasted time and resources on tasks that deliver minimal results.

• Cost-Efficiency: in a lot of businesses, budgets reduce in size: causing staff to have to do more with less. Leveraging our crowd can result in vastly improved processes that allow for cost savings in many cases.