Digitalizing has a positive impact on our innovation activities, it opens up new exciting possibilities. The first question of what, how and why are we doing this, we can start by looking at the data to begin to see there are potential ways to change something existing or improve on our idea or concept. As we gain insights then we can apply that innovative thinking with a greater technology application understanding.
We then begin to make the changes within the process, be those incremental, radical or even revolutionary to change the processes operating today.
We have distinctive ways to treat data and digitalization that leads to distinct new value points for innovation.
A useful view was provided by the IBM Institute for Business Value identified five distinct opportunities where digital innovation provides additional value:
- We gain new insights that augment products and change our thinking by the generation of real-time or constant flows of market and customer-driven data
- We improve our assets by digitalizing them. We can connect up machines, whole plants and complete organizations can be designed around the flows of data. This has an enormous impact on the potential to collaborate, to liaise, learn and build from this data, a new fresh knowledge insight. This can trigger ideas and new concepts to be evaluated as well as gain from having full oversight over the assets generating data or that coming into the company.
- The ability today is to combine data within and across different industries. Within our move towards platforms and ecosystems the exchange of data allows for a “greater whole” to view it, add insights and knowledge and from this combined effect those within the ecosystem can gain a commercial and competitive advantage to build appropriate products, services, and business models in response
- Each party is building up its own data. We are in times where trading data has become a highly valuable new source of revenue. Knowing weather patterns helps farmers, utility and those dependent on delivery to know and plan far better. We can trade audience data, interest in articles or newsworthy stories so others can associate with these to build more of a profile of who is engaged so they can offer products and services more tailored to their possible needs. The business of trading data is the new oil in the economy
- Lastly, we can begin to organize data into more distinctive patterns, service capability options and build more sustainable systems where you build increasingly an accepted language that becomes codified in some way that gives new value. We can systemize thinking through data that allows for uniformity and allows multiple systems to exchange and see patterns. This is where algorithms have increased value. They can predict change.
Each of these new ways to use the evolution of digitalization to add completely different levels of innovation potential. Seeing this value is one thing, achieving the connecting aspects it requires is another. As we continue to make deeper and deeper connections into manufacturing sites we do need to consider not just the value of digitalization and what it connects up, we need to study and review the data to look for the innovation opportunities to make this an ever greater impact on productivity, efficiencies but more import allowing us to think and design differently, to begin to think changes in technology and innovation.
Innovation and digitalization are as powerful as innovation and knowledge in their combination. They both combine to give new insights, new options to generate significant new and greater value. The sooner we can bring in digital solutions and processes into the innovation process of the industrial process, the better to realize some of the real potentials that this combination can give us, as fresh opportunities to add new value
