Leveraging IoT and Cloud Computing for Business Innovation

Opening the Door to Collaboration

If you want your organization to generate more ideas, cultivating a company-wide approach that welcomes innovation from all directions is essential. Thankfully, intrapreneurship can become accessible with the right tools enabling bottom-up and top-down innovation to work in unison. The combination of cloud computing and a dedicated innovation strategy, should yield far better results.

It allows intrapreneurs to work on their ideas with confidence while simultaneously seeking input from colleagues at various stages of the innovation funnel. In fact, cloud-based interactions can even welcome input from clients and external parties. 

Promoting Data-driven Decisions

Successful innovation programs are able to kill bad ideas quickly, thus enabling employees to focus only on the best-suited solutions. Data-driven decisions spearheaded by real-time data can streamline the R&D phases, not least in the prototyping stage. Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices produce a wealth of data from physical and digital environments before immediately relaying the info back to cloud computing systems.

Ultimately, this allows employees to gain clearer insights throughout each stage of developing ideas. For instance, General Electric (GE) uses IoT data to monitor and predict maintenance needs in their machinery. This removes emotion from decision-making processes for a faster route to market, ensuring equipment is serviced before failures occur. The data insights from IoT can also guide future iterations, helping GE continuously improve their machines' performance and reliability. 

Another example is Tesla, who uses IoT data from its fleet of vehicles to gather insights on performance and driver behavior. This data is then analyzed and used to release over-the-air updates, improving the car's functionality and addressing potential issues before they become widespread problems.

Building a better mindset for innovation

Killing bad ideas fast is important, but that shouldn’t mean that the efforts are wasted. Failure should be seen as a step on the path to success. When employees learn from their failures and are supported by organizations, it will remove the fear of failure, which is often a huge obstacle to innovation. Naturally, this encourages intrapreneurs to keep trying new ideas including incremental and radical innovations.

Using IoT and cloud computing data ensures that all information from innovation research is accessible to all employees, which may hold the key to unlocking future successes. This wealth of data helps in making informed decisions about which ideas to pursue or discard. For example, data from IoT sensors can indicate the real-time performance of prototypes, allowing teams to identify underperforming ideas early and focus resources on promising ones, thus strengthening innovation strategies.

Amazon does this well. By analyzing data from IoT-enabled devices, Amazon can quickly identify inefficiencies and implement solutions in its warehouse operations. This ensures a continuous improvement cycle, fostering a culture where learning from failure leads to innovation and growth. This demonstrates how data-driven decisions can propel a company forward.

Supporting scalability

The combination of IoT and cloud computing is particularly useful for scalability. With cloud solutions, you can easily acquire more virtual server space as needed, without the hassle of adding physical hardware. This flexibility supports the seamless growth of innovation projects.

Therefore, leveraging cloud-based innovation solutions can significantly enhance the entire innovation process. By integrating cloud computing with your innovation strategies, you can ensure scalability, improve data accessibility, and streamline the journey from idea to implementation.

Upscaling innovation with IoT and cloud computing isn’t just about the capabilities for individuals. The collaboration and ability to roll innovation out across the business, ensuring that contextuality and viability are always in mind can drive ideas to natural evolutions.

Are you rready to upgrade your innovation strategy?