Willingness or capacity, which comes first in ensuring digital diligence?

Is ensuring full 360 diligence on your digital marketing and operations a perennial chicken and egg situation as to which comes first: budget or capacity? Or is it lack of awareness that stops companies from investing in this essential intel?

Many companies seem stuck or have lost their edge like these 10 iconic companies, having not been able to innovate or adopt technologies quick enough. Or indeed to respond to consumer demand, whether it be digital or other.  Why?  Because they didn’t know what was happening around them until it was too late.

Understanding culture and technology, software and hardware, customer and staff is crucial to an organisation embracing its own future.

Vijay Govindaran, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and co-author of The Other Side of Innovation, succinctly summarises the 3 main obstacles of developmental innovation:

• First, the physical trap, where previous huge investments in infrastructure prevent the search and adoption of new infrastructure and more refreshing investments.
• Second, the psychological trap, where company leaders think what made the company successful will be eternal, then fail to notice what is actually displacing them beneath their feet – think Black Cabs and Uber, why didn’t the black cabs get an app?
• Third, the Strategic Trap where companies have calibrated their strategies only on the current, static market based with little emphasis on medium and long-term shifts of the market.

“Never assume you have the market figured out, it changes.”

So where do you start in gathering intelligence to help create innovation strategies?  How can a company ensure that the need for this permeates all levels of a business organisation?  How do you create a culture of information and innovation (without the need for a Google-esque hipster environment?

Progress doesn’t necessarily come from a stream of new ideas from an ever churning staff – the culture of innovation can be nurtured through retaining workforce who appreciate the value of information gathering, ideas generation and constant monitoring of their marketplace.

Whether information is gathered through reporting, consultants or cross-department mentoring, the key is that at some point an investment needs to be made into understanding what is happening in your marketplace and why?  Innovation only comes from an awareness of what is happening around you.

If it ain’t broken don’t fix it? Well until you see someone else with a newer shinier teapot and lose your custom to them. The only way to guarantee innovation influx is to know what’s coming up. If you need help, give us a call.

Oh, and which comes first: the chicken of investment or the egg of capacity? Well, eggs break, that’s all we’ll say…

To find out more about how onefourzero’s digital due diligence and insights can help you identify opportunities for growth and potential risks, contact fleur@onefourzerogroup.com