I’m often asked the question, “How can we accelerate mobile innovation?” And my answer has always been the same—getting closer to your mobile customers is the only way!
When it comes to mobile innovation, your users (customers) will be the key to your success whether we’re talking about mobile app development, mobile web sites, enterprise mobility, or mobile business intelligence (BI). Moreover, it doesn’t matter if your customers are internal or external to your team or your organization.
“Innovation” means different things to different people. In its basic form, innovation is how we create new things, whether they’re completely new solutions or improvements over existing ones. In this context, innovation is creating new or smart ways of developing mobile solutions that can deliver value for unmet needs.
The idea of getting closer to customers to accelerate innovation may sound simple at first, and it may appear to demand no additional thought, but it isn’t as easy as it appears.
Here are four tips that will help you accelerate mobile innovation with your customers.
1. Make Your Customer an Integral Part of Your Mobile Vision
You need to bring your mobile users closer to the design engine where your ideas unfold and assumptions get validated. And it starts and ends with leadership that demands a vision keen to take a holistic approach in dealing with all aspects of the mobile user experience.
This means involving your users actively in the process from day one. They must touch and play with the first prototype as much as they would during the testing phase. Their continuous feedback should become the lifeblood of your development effort.
2. The Empathy Principle Is Key to Innovation
We need to apply what I refer to as the empathy principle in design thinking, a practice that involves opening up our nerve endings, so to speak, and increasing our awareness, so we can feel what the mobile journey looks like from their perspective:
- Live in your customers’ shoes—don’t just document them
- Feel their pain firsthand—don’t just observe them
- Persevere through their challenges—don’t just record them
Mobile innovation demands customer-centric products and solutions. The empathy principle is a prerequisite for it.
3. Think Outside the Mobile Device
Thinking outside the mobile device means thinking about mobile value first. You need to put a strong emphasis on how your mobile products or solutions can help drive growth and profitability. And not just for your customers, but for your customers’ customers—that’s the success criterion that matters most.
To realize the true value of mobile, integrated solutions—where each part completes the mobile user experience as a whole—are a must. Use mobile to deliver unique insight and a unique experience, not just data or hollow apps. Last thing we want is to build fragmented pieces that make up a mobile stack or reflect PC-era design practices.
4. Use Collective Expertise for Collective Insight
You need to bring multidisciplinary roles together at the table in order to leverage the power of collective expertise that covers both technical and business knowhow. All the members of your extended design team (which should also include your users/customers) bring not only their subject matter expertise, but also their insight from their personal and professional experiences that go beyond their tenure in their current roles. Together, with collective expertise, they can give birth to collective insight.
This is important because your collective insight will be the guiding light when best practices alone may not be enough to help you navigate in uncharted waters.
What other ways can you accelerate mobile innovation with your customers?
By Kaan Turnali, EPM Channel Contributor, from:
As Global Senior Director, Business Intelligence (BI), for SAP’s Global Customer Operations (GCO) Reporting & Analytics Platform, Kaan Turnali is responsible for the development, oversight, and execution of strategy for the BI platform across GCO’s worldwide user base. In addition, he manages special mobile BI projects for the Office of co-CEO Bill McDermott and the GCO senior management team. Prior to joining SAP in 2006, he worked as a senior BI consultant specializing in strategy, design, and development of enterprise BI solutions for SMEs and Fortune 500 companies. His background and experience in the integration of business and technology span over two decades. He is also an adjunct professor, teaching BI in the doctor of business administration program at Wilmington University. See Kaan’s articles on EPM Channel here.