With the ever increasing competitive landscapes, blurring markets and consumer demands, business agility is the business’ capability to adapt rapidly and cost-efficient to that landscape and its target audiences.
According to the MIT Centre for Digital Business, in order to cost-effectively solve broad business problem and co-create e.g. a new product choice, a marketing campaign or a new service experience, enterprises need to start taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowds” available through social media data, or risk missing out on huge opportunities to boost business.
This is where Open Business and its enablers -social media and co-creation- fuel business agility through continual innovation to be able to react and act on external developments.
Social media as doorways
By using social media as doorways and being able to cost-effectively open up the business, the entities that actually force/create the changes in demands are involved, to swiftly act and react with them and their intelligence. This applies to supply- and value chain. When speaking about intelligence, this can be consumer insights (unmet needs and current experiences, market intelligence and competitive intelligence.
As spend in digital peer-to-peer environments rise, rapid and consequential changes in digital and social marketing for organizations to take control – to get serious and efficient. The organization as a whole (infrastructure, work flows, stakeholders, technologies and so on) needs to be reconfigured and enhanced where needed for cost-efficient and effective social media usage. As soon as as the groundwork has been laid, it’s time to bring in the continual innovation process.
Continual innovation “may be the most powerful of any competitive advantage for a business. It creates game-changing breakthroughs. Along parallel lines, bit by bit, it also tweaks improvements in existing products, chips away at costs and debugs processes — in every corner of the company, all non-stop. In a turbulent business environment like today’s, it’s essential for helping a business move from playing defense to playing an aggressive, and winning, offense.” Take this and overlay it with social media and co-creation, real-time consumer insights that can be extracted, molded and poured back into the right supply chain.
The groundwork and continual innovation aren’t sequential processes, often it’s learning by process, pragmatic, making enhancements along the way. Both pioneering and incremental innovations are enabled by the constant understanding of the customer, market and competitors. Social media enables validation of current products and services, but is able to uncover groundbreaking innovations when doing bottom up Social Media research.
How are you unfolding Open Business in your organization to enable agility and continual innovation?
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