No-Code Innovation
No-code platforms can revolutionise an organisations’ approach to innovation.
The advent of no-code platforms provides a single, manageable toolset that enables businesses to ensure that customer experiences do not occur in a vacuum, so that the opportunity to delight customers is not siloed from the professionals who know how.
Providing a streamlined and cost-effective means of testing and implementing new ideas, No Code addresses the risk perceptions and resource obstacles that can stop innovation happening.
Because No-Code platforms contain a complete toolset for application development, innovators don’t need to continually request resources to develop, test and implement new ideas. This means that organisations adopting a No-Code strategy can:
- Eliminate the competition for innovation resources
- Avoid trade-offs between innovation and business continuity
- Make innovation work a manageable and strategic business function
By eliminating the competition for attention and resources, no-code platforms provide a clear path for innovation to happen freely and rapidly.
No-code can help to bridge the gap between innovation strategy and execution, ensuring that businesses remain relevant and competitive in today’s dynamic marketplace without exposing themselves to unnecessary risk.
Innovation is essential to staying competitive and relevant. Product teams, businesses, even entire industries can rise or fall depending on how much they innovate.
Despite the disruptive business models that have changed how people interact, travel, consume content, receive goods, and rent (or rent out) properties, etc., many organisations struggle to integrate innovation into their strategy.
This disconnect often stems from the challenges associated with introducing new ideas into an established corporate structure which will have concerns around security, governance, standardisation and compliance.
A major problem that arises in these situations is that valuable knowledge can be siloed, real-world experiences or opportunities to innovate treated as departmental problems and new ideas isolated from having a strategic impact.
When people managing customer experiences are not directly involved in shaping their organisation’s digital strategy or unable to influence how technology supports their role, the opportunity to innovate may be limited to internal developments. While there are clear advantages to innovating to achieve operational efficiencies and organisational effectiveness, it’s difficult to see that these can be disruptive for competitors if they do not produce differentiated value for customers..
Innovation Challenges in Digital Strategy
While almost every organisation claims to have a digital strategy, the reality is that innovation often takes a back seat and is relegated to a supporting role, typically embedded within IT departments.
This means that innovations identified by customer-facing employees or departments often face significant obstacles. They must contend with perceptions that new ideas might disrupt established business processes or compete with other objectives for resources.
The Prolonged Pathway to Innovation :
Innovation processes within traditional corporate structures often follow a lengthy and convoluted pathway, which includes various stages:
By the time an innovative idea traverses this entire journey, it may have lost its relevance … How many hotel groups were improving the airport-to-hotel experience before being disrupted by Uber and Airbnb?
Product Standardisation:
Another roadblock, especially for innovation within corporations, is that many organisations have decided to standardise on a particular software stack like Microsoft, SAP, or Oracle. While there are advantages to standardising on a single technology stack, the opportunity for innovation can be limited by the technology stack itself, but more often by the presence of a growing list of change requests from multiple departments.
Tackling the IT backlog is the main target of No-Code. Backlogs and is the enemy of innovation because new ideas which may be opportunistic (e.g. related to an event like a global pandemic) can be relegated, never to emerge again because the opportunity has passed. At best IT backlogs can become a bottleneck, at worst they may prevent promising innovations from ever seeing the light of day. The way to avoid this is to adopt a No-Code strategy that compliments corporate IT by allowing non-conforming ideas to be developed, tested, and business cases to be proven before being incorporated into the backlog.
Resource Scarcity:
While risk perceptions may stop an innovation from happening, there are also significant issues in terms of resourcing projects. As an example, investors take huge financial risks on start-ups with the potential to disrupt a marketplace, and they hope that this risk translates into high returns. What it also means is those startups can afford to hire highly paid developers to create their propositions without distraction. For an established business it’s a different scenario, the availability of skilled IT professionals and the organisation's capacity to facilitate substantial changes can act as major roadblocks. If those skills are required to keep business critical systems working, companies may hesitate to divert IT resources to support innovation.
Trade-offs based on risk and costs:
Organisations frequently grapple with assessing whether long-term innovations are worth the short-term costs. This dilemma is exacerbated by the explicit risk of innovation … at the end of the day, they may not work as intended. The risk perception of innovation then hinders the development and implementation of innovative ideas as immediate financial gains with better known risk will usually take precedence over any possible longer-term benefits of spending on innovation.
Trade-offs based on risk and costs:
Organisations frequently grapple with assessing whether long-term innovations are worth the short-term costs. This dilemma is exacerbated by the explicit risk of innovation … at the end of the day, they may not work as intended. The risk perception of innovation then hinders the development and implementation of innovative ideas as immediate financial gains with better known risk will usually take precedence over any possible longer-term benefits of spending on innovation.
Resource Scarcity:
While risk perceptions may stop an innovation from happening, there are also significant issues in terms of resourcing projects. As an example, investors take huge financial risks on start-ups with the potential to disrupt a marketplace, and they hope that this risk translates into high returns. What it also means is those startups can afford to hire highly paid developers to create their propositions without distraction. For an established business it’s a different scenario, the availability of skilled IT professionals and the organisation's capacity to facilitate substantial changes can act as major roadblocks. If those skills are required to keep business critical systems working, companies may hesitate to divert IT resources to support innovation.
Product Standardisation:
Another roadblock, especially for innovation within corporations, is that many organisations have decided to standardise on a particular software stack like Microsoft, SAP, or Oracle. While there are advantages to standardising on a single technology stack, the opportunity for innovation can be limited by the technology stack itself, but more often by the presence of a growing list of change requests from multiple departments.
Tackling the IT backlog is the main target of No-Code. Backlogs and is the enemy of innovation because new ideas which may be opportunistic (e.g. related to an event like a global pandemic) can be relegated, never to emerge again because the opportunity has passed. At best IT backlogs can become a bottleneck, at worst they may prevent promising innovations from ever seeing the light of day. The way to avoid this is to adopt a No-Code strategy that compliments corporate IT by allowing non-conforming ideas to be developed, tested, and business cases to be proven before being incorporated into the backlog.
The Prolonged Pathway to Innovation :
Innovation processes within traditional corporate structures often follow a lengthy and convoluted pathway, which includes various stages:
- Ideas originate from employees at the base level.
- These ideas are reported to management.
- They are then analyzed and designed as innovations.
- A business case is presented to leadership.
- The innovation is entered into the IT backlog.
- Eventually, innovation becomes part of corporate services.
By the time an innovative idea traverses this entire journey, it may have lost its relevance … How many hotel groups were improving the airport-to-hotel experience before being disrupted by Uber and Airbnb?
No-Code Platforms turbo-charge your innovation
Removing Barriers to Entry:
No-code platforms democratise the innovation process because individuals with no coding background can design and build applications. This removes the need for buy-in from multiple stakeholders and allows innovative projects to move forward more swiftly.
Reducing IT Dependency:
By taking innovation out of the IT backlog you’ll get your solution more quickly and reduce the reliance on IT departments, this frees up resources for core operational tasks and enables your non-technical staff to independently create and implement solutions.
Flexibility and Adaptability:
No-code platforms are highly adaptable and flexible, allowing businesses to experiment with new ideas quickly and easily. This agility permits organisations to stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment.
No-code empowers organisations to rapidly develop and test new ideas, without depending heavily on IT professionals and without competing with established business processes.
If you want to make your organisation’s approach to innovation agile and nimble make No-Code your innovation priority and contact us today.
Discover why NO-CODE INNOVATION is the ideal choice for your business
About us
Why choose Format14CRM AS CRM PARTNER?
Our team has skills and experiences from a range of different customer experience, software development and technology backgrounds. We take pride in contributing to your vision, developing your technology ambitions, and helping you to get the technical parts of your business right.
Does your business’ Ecosystem need a helping hand?
Format14CRM has the skills, experience and knowledge to turn even the most challenging set of requirements into a real world software application. If that means a customised CRM or creating a new business software application that you just can’t seem to find anywhere, we’d love to hear from you!