Mankind is on the embarkment of the fourth industrial revolution. The advent of the era of inter-connectedness has brought much-needed boost to businesses. Technologies such as RPA, IoT, AI, VR, and ML have established applications across industries. Digitization is rapidly harnessing technology to bring out-of-the-box solutions for business problems and establish streamlining across processes, rendering them agility, quality, efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation. This transformation can be easily seen in our day-to-day lives. Innovation, in particular, has brought radical changes in the way we eat, work, communicate, shop, travel and even consume media.
Let’s try to understand what digital innovation is. It is the smart application of new technologies to solve existing business problems. Digital innovation drives technology to improve business processes, enhance customer experience, boost workforce productivity, and launch new products or business models. Innovation is rapidly evolving with advancement in technology. Here is how.
- Optimize Big Data: Digitization helps big data sets offer large waves of information that can be analyzed to uncover patterns, associations, and trends, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. Such analytics helps businesses engage people online and motivate them to follow the desirous calls-to-action. Business teams such as marketing, finance, and R&D act upon the information available to drive better results. That’s how digital innovations optimize business data, rendering the organization a competitive advantage in the market.
- Reshape Marketing Strategies: Customers try and test multiple communication channels before engaging themselves with a business. With innovative digital strategies, marketers can turn around these touch-points into acquisition channels. Examples of such channels are social media, websites, chat-bots, blogs, webinars, and mobile apps, as also offline media such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, billboards, and events. Innovation in digital space allows firms to target customers with well-timed offers and tailored marketing messages that suit an individual’s specific purchasing habits and preferences.
- Promote Job Evolution: Digitization has refashioned jobs and industries, and helped reset the entire business environment. It has brought a wave of change, a revolution in the field of job management. People may fear that technology could curb their jobs, however if they continue learning new digital languages and keep acquiring relevant knowledge and skills, they’d certainly stay relevant on the professional front. Additionally, digitization is making hiring processes smarter and on-the-job education more popular than before. As jobs evolve and skill demands widen, employers and employees look for ways to upgrade skills and fill in the gaps while ensuring effective career management.
- Bring Insights into Transportation and Logistics: The transportation and logistics industry has started using digital technologies in order to improve efficiency of operations and bring transformation in an end-to-end manner. With innovative digital solutions available in the market, it has become easier than before to manage supply chains courtesy real-time information and insights. Analytics also enables leaders to make faster and more informed decisions, resulting into better margins and more delightful customer experiences. Digitized operational partnerships with transportation companies let organizations enhance their visibility and performance in the markets.
- Transform Manufacturing processes: Using innovative technologies available, digitization transforms manufacturing operations into memorable experiences for both the customers and the employees. Technologies like RFID and CCTV play an important role when it comes to securing products and resources against theft. They collect massive quantities of device-generated data. Likewise, digitization of the supply chain positions manufacturers as innovators within their markets. Through predictive maintenance and machine learning, the performance of machines is understood, while algorithms get adapted with new information. In fact, with the adoption of technology, manufacturers get the ability to create personalized products. Modern production technologies help boost speed of production cycles and prove helpful for decision-making.
- Bring fluidity to the education system: As the world is moving towards digitalization, education industry is also harnessing its sheer power. Digitization introduces pragmatic approaches to track students’ learning and performance, as also the teachers’ delivery and assessment. It helps evaluate a child’s progress easily by taking care of administrative tasks such as attendance, examination scores, and assignments in an automated manner. Such an automation also allows the teachers and the students to focus on teaching and learning respectively. Digitalization in education is also a boon for parents; they can easily keep track of their wards’ progress by logging into the institution’s website. Innovation in education through digitization lets parents and teachers strike a long-lasting partnership.
Technology-driven innovation is being widely recognized as an economic growth driver in the future. It is leading to creation of an all-round optimism, involving businesses, governments, customers, citizens, employees and many more stakeholders. Last but not the least, innovation through digital means offers organizations opportunities to create value for customers and employees, and grow in an inclusive and sustainable manner.
