Innovators, How Do You Find Your Next Problem to Solve?

The Innovator for business can be Startups, teams specializing in innovation research or technology solution providers to solve business problems. There are so many problems in today’s businesses that need to be optimized and transformed by digital technology, so how do providers of innovative solutions “scratch the itch” of businesses.

When you don’t know the direction, look back to the starting point

Focusing on the goal makes it easier to determine the direction

If you’re working in innovation there’s nothing as rewarding as making the long journey from inspiration to implementation.

We love seeing the pictures of our customers alongside the aisle end cap that showcases their new product or sharing an award that an innovator received for their great suggestion… but that generally means that an innovation team is ready for another challenge – they’re ready to source a problem for someone else and start that journey again.

For many of our customers, they want to open their innovation programs to other departments and help them solve problems, but they’re not sure how to identify potential business owners who might want their help and they’re not sure how to bring them along in the process.

That’s why we created our infographic on how to find your next challenge sponsor. Basically, IdeaScale customers have two main challenges when it comes to this: “how do I find sponsors for my challenge” and then “what sort of support should I offer when they’re running an innovation challenge or sprint?” Well, we’ve got some suggestions that should help you.

Listen to customers

Communicate with customers to find solutions together

Like most things, a good starting point is to follow the money… Usually departments who are underperforming and under-resourced need some help optimizing. It would be a great tactic to reach out to those business owners and find out how you can help them shoulder the burden and potentially start improving their results.

Another tactic that we use a lot is running a problem-sensing campaign. Reach out to your crowd of employees or customers and ask them what they think needs to be addressed. Almost everyone will have a suggestion on something they think needs attention. Then you can go to those business owners with some validated support for trends that those leaders should be paying attention to.

Drive open innovation with innovate solutions

Learn from our customers

Conversely, departments that are well-resourced with big budgets are generally open to trying out new ideas and have some bandwidth to explore new concepts. Reaching out to these business owners might inspire them and you could help impact big goals and feel pretty confident that the good ideas will be implemented.

Don’t let ideas just lie on paper

An idea succeeds when it is put into practice

At NASA, they refer to their innovation team as “innovation Sherpas.” This means that they’re helping those business owners articulate their key problems, identify good solutions, and supporting them as they implement new ideas. For many of IdeaScale’s customers, these innovation teams provide templated workbooks that help challenge owners plan the problem statement language, plot a communications strategy and make sure that the challenge results all ladder up to meaningful KPIs. Of course, each challenge is unique, but some aspects of the innovation process are repeatable – find out where your innovation team’s expertise lies and help those business leaders when you can.

For corporations and businesses looking for innovative solutions

Open-minded to embrace open innovation

The process of formation and development of an enterprise is a series of days, even years, to think, research trends, propose solutions, deploy and optimize it. In an era where open innovation develops and receives a lot of attention today, the ability to predict, analyze, pose many problems for the future and solve it in creative ways is an important factor. important, determining the breakthrough of the enterprise. Sometimes the solution to the breakthrough does not come from within the business, let’s openly share the problem and accept the solutions from outside.

👉 BambuUP Innovation Connecting Platform helps innovators to share solutions with businesses and help businesses find the right solution. Connect now https://bambuup.com/services