Accelerate Innovation through Vendor Ecosystems
Vendor ecosystem applications provide an extra option in finding business improvement opportunities for your organization. Finding business improvement opportunities is a part of strategy planning or project portfolio planning for most organizations. Extending, engaging and challenging your organizations’ network is an attractive and cost effective way to invigorate the existing research efforts.
In the book the Innovator’s DNA the authors - Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen - describe that one quality which many innovators share, is having a broad and diverse network. This network stimulates them to assimilate insight and inspiration from a diverse variety of angles and perspectives. There are compelling reasons to assume that the same holds for organizations. Your organizations’ environment is continuously influenced by a wide range of trends and technologies – eg. commercial, cultural, sociographic, political, technological and environmental. The speed of change keeps increasing and new opportunities arise. In this turbulence your organizations’ network is another source of information to involve in your reconnaissance.
Effectively involving your vendor network can be started by sharing questions, challenges and opportunities in ‘business development challenges’. These are idea generation projects, which are being conducted in online and onsite events. By consistently creating appealing challenges and by rewarding your contributors for the valuable insights they bring in, your organization will grow loyalty and community engagement, and simultaneously find high quality long lists of opportunities for business improvement. A growing number of organizations has implemented successful programs for doing community innovation challenges. These programs often involve employees and customers, and your sourcing partners have a special contribution to make, as they have another perspective and another set of knowledge and insight to share with you.
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