Wazoku Blog

The workplace of today is so different to the workplace of 50 or even 25 years ago; it has changed completely. Everything is faster, more immediate, more accessible and more global. The workforce itself is more geographically dispersed, more transient and less tied to the physical workplace, with technology, of course, underpinning a lot of these changes.

We now regularly speak of the gig economy, multi-generational workforces and zero hours contracts – terms which weren’t even thought of 25 years ago. The concept of a job for life is now gone. It’s perfectly acceptable to spend just two or three years in a role, building a portfolio career or having several careers during one’s working life.

There’s no question the world of work has evolved over time. Advances in mechanisation, mass production and, more recently, technology have shaped where and how we work, as well as what we produce. The need for people and organisations to innovate has always been there but what’s much harder to comprehend, and therefore navigate, is the rapid pace of change we’re experiencing, on a scale we’ve never seen before.

Driven by advancing technologies, accelerating connectivity, and changing attitudes towards employment, organisations are operating in a dynamic environment – one where fast-growing start-ups are disrupting traditional business models and AI is replacing human labour. Most organisations today understand the importance of innovation but there was a time when it was a dirty word.

Wazoku, a leading idea management platform, announced its Winter 2019 product release with features designed to equip organisations with better visibility into the value of their ideas and their innovation pipeline. “Managing truly effective and impactful innovation can be like directing a complex orchestra with many moving parts. You need to get the right people involved, through the right ways, and make sure they stay engaged throughout the process,” said Rosemarie Diegnan, CS&PO, Co-Founder, Wazoku. “Working with our customers, we’ve built better advanced tools to better report on the data around their innovation programs, understand the value of ideas in their pipeline and embed Challenges in the enterprise software tools that the organisation is already using.” Here are some of the highlights of our Winter product release:

Realise the true ROI of your innovations and ideas

Organisations have a wide range of business, product and strategic goals they’re trying to meet. These objectives have important financial metrics, but there are also other targets such as sustainability, diversity or employee satisfaction that are essential to the continued growth and success of the business. As teams gather new ideas and embark on new innovation projects, quantifying the value of these projects against measurable business goals help teams prioritise the right projects and get buy-in from senior stakeholders.

We’ve enhanced Idea Spotlight’s Outcomes functionality to better enable idea creators to refine their ideas and business leaders to track the value of ideas across the organisation. “We have always known that the true value of the ideas we help organisations to deliver was far more than we were surfacing to date,” said Simon Hill, CEO & Founder, Wazoku. “With this new functionality, Wazoku clients can see and report at a granular level the true impact (and it can often be a significant financial value) across the businesses of the great work they do.” Set start and end dates for when various outcomes might occur – both gains and costs – so that the organisation can better understand the value of ideas over time and when an idea might start to pay it back. Additional subject matter experts can be brought in at the end of the implementation process to report back on the actual outcomes of an idea and record down what the idea has brought the organisation. From conception to implementation, analytics demonstrate the value of the innovation pipeline at each stage of the process and drive better decision making.