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Innovation is a major trigger of success nowadays. Companies focus on creative and innovative thinking rather than on conventional criteria of professionalism that used to be in demand earlier.
Innovation is a new race field where corporations interact, compete, and grow. Evolution is an ultimate premise of sustainable business and a product with the future. Having evaluated a crucial role of innovation for success in the upcoming year, we have prepared a collection of the most interesting and relevant trends of corporate innovations for the next year.
.1 Own Venture Capital
This is a solely owned venture capital located inside a corporation and aimed for the ideas and developments of the employees and/or departments. Evidently, this trend will be relevant to well-established and solid corporations. Nevertheless, young and developing companies can also aspire to this level, starting with small steps targeted to set cornerstones for the future. Apart from that, this kind of capital is a significant motivation for the employees. On the other hand, investing in ideas of personnel is an essential advantage for a company to expand and increase level of impact on the market. Along with its potential and perspectives, there are also considerable risks as far as many startups financed by the venture capital do not succeed; hence, there is a rather high percent of failures.
.2 Heading a startup
This is indeed one of the boldest and potentially quite a profitable direction in the future business realm. Heading a startup implies purchase or ownership of the prevailing number of shares in rival startups as well as development of own accelerators targeted on use of startups for their innovative purposes. This decision will require ultimate awareness and meticulous selection of the rival startups since such moves are also often associated with high rates of risk. Apart from that, ownership or having a major share in the rival company implies accurate and perspective vision of its further performance and role, taking into consideration that it is a rival to the central organization. It implies that the owner will need a smart and constructive long-term strategy for both companies, and all of them, if there are several ones. Basically, mega-tech corporations use such an approach and grow due to it. as a result, two primary goals are achieved:
- the rivals are eliminated or subdued;
- the share of influence on the market becomes incremental as well.
This strategy was used in the brick and mortar sectors of business years and even decades ago, and Internet domain is no different when it comes to becoming a leader and outwining the competitors. 16Best has an excellent infographic featuring ownership and business connections:
Learning from the leaders is an excellent strategy when you are a newcomer in the industry or when your company has just entered a path of corporate growth. Just remember that buying shares or another company is relevant only when your own company delivers product or service of proper quality and faces no serious problems, both internal and external ones.
.3 Active implementation of design thinking in teams and units of corporations
Design thinking implies approach to solution of problems based on the same principles and tools conventionally used by designers. Initially, this approach functioned in the dimension of management targeted to solve managerial problems and dilemmas. Recent studies have revealed potential of design thinking when used in the sphere of organizational culture in corporations, and this discovery will be widely utilized in the nearest future in the corporate area. In such a way, the experts recommend development and proper maintenance of excellent culture in the company providing it with constructive and efficient working process, relationships and attitudes, instead of solving numerous problems and trying to save the corporate structure with diverse defects. It is recommended to design a single implementation program with proper stages of performance for the whole company so as to maintain holistic and sustainable effect.
.4 Innovation Labs
This trend implies a space where personnel can concentrate on profound investigation and comprehension of customers’ needs and preferences in order to create a new line of products and services pertinent to the target audience. This kind of innovations predicted to play leading role in 2020 will serve as a separate dimension of innovative departments. It is of ultimate importance to distinguish between R&D department and innovation labs since they are expected to overlap, yet simultaneously to complete different missions in a corporation. It is assumed that excellent innovation labs comprise safety in its widest meaning, functionality, and attendance by creative and responsible experts. Many companies have negative experience with innovative labs and associate them with waste of time and money. Nevertheless, the core idea behind this concept is functionality, which does not mean surplus or the most expensive constituent elements, but rather focuses on safety, dedication, and relevance. What is the most crucial thing to understand: you should never even start thinking about establishing innovations labs if you do not have creative experts in your team who will have sufficient competence and understanding of the process occurring in such places of innovative activity.
.5 One or trend of 2020 will be a confident shift from R&D to entrepreneurship
This innovative approach will be employed in corporations in order to motivate their personnel as decent entrepreneurs, not as hired human resources or even as valuable experts. As research reveals, such attitudes escalate motivation and, therefore, efficiency rates in the workplace. This will be a perspective, yet quite challenging tendency, and initially it will be applicable in corporations with sufficient amount of experts and contributing agents. It is relevant to underline that employees regarded as target audience for such kind of motivation should correspond to the acclaimed status, namely, to be not only proficient in their field of activity, but also to understand essence, mechanics, and potential of entrepreneurship.
.6 Smart Workspaces & Internal Accelerators
This phenomenon involves implementation of smart workplace space and internal accelerators for the staff. Actually, smart workplace is not a brand-new concept, but its practical actualization has been enhanced with the course of time.
Trends for 2020 will rely on the following:
- entrance of the generation Z in the office picture;
- maximal level of digital maturity;
- focus on flexibility and comfort rather than on prestigious items and conventional office style;
- social connection will be a significant part, not a sweet addition as it used to be earlier, of corporate routine;
- team collaboration will be another priority to attend to in 2020;
Apart from that, corporate concern and contribution to wellbeing of their personnel is expected to increase in the upcoming year. Furthermore, employers will also expand scale of freedom and individual expression as a contribution to personnel’s productivity and creative performance. Along with such, even more trainings and upskilling activities will be conducted for the staff when compared with previous years since this trend only starts its expansion in the corporate sector.
.7 Increase of the rate of expenses on IT and software development is also expected
This innovation was quite predictable taking into consideration transformations and enhancements of business entities and processual patterns observed in the recent course of time. IT budgets are expected to grow along with replacement of outdated technologies in corporations with advanced alternatives, expected on the global scale. Statistics in the given area is just marvelous: 44% of business entities their intentions to increase tech expenses in 2020, whereas the number of respondents who planned to do the same in 2019 was 38%. The issue of security is one of the core triggers of such increases in IT budget.
Hence, a reliable tech partner and a smart strategy will be two main keys to success in 2020 for those corporations with IT expansion plans.
