Wazoku Blog

A lot has changed at Wazoku in the last six months. As is to be expected from a company at the forefront of the innovation industry, we don’t stay still for long. Since my last Product Roadmap, we’ve secured $8.5M in Series B investment, brought a collective intelligence start-up into our business, and won a number of awards and accreditations, including our new B Corp™ Certificate.

Getting the opportunity to meet up, connect, and collaborate with leaders in the innovation space is one of the highlights of my job. It’s something that in the last couple of years, for fairly obvious reasons that we don’t want to revisit, has been made virtually impossible. The return of in-person events in 2021 brought with it a renewed sense of hope and energy in the innovation industry as a whole. As I prepare to attend this year’s North Star event in Dubai, I can’t wait to see how this has been channelled into the work of the world’s foremost innovative businesses.

Our friends at Gartner recently published a blog that identified 9 actions that organizations should take to effectively navigate a recession. Upon reviewing this piece, we recognized that a company's ability to innovate is fundamental to the implementation of all 9 of these actions.

Quiet quitting is a phenomenon taking the internet by storm. It’s a trend that is bringing attention to the disillusionment felt by workers across the globe: who don’t feel valued, face burnout, and aren't inspired to go above and beyond. It’s a form of quitting that doesn’t involve an employee outright leaving an organization, but means that they have mentally checked out, putting in no more effort than is absolutely necessary. This is detrimental in many ways but can be particularly damaging to an organization’s day-to-day business and its ability to innovate and drive change. A lot of the time, employees are the everyday innovators that a business relies on to find great ideas.

The Center for the Transformation of Work (CTW) community calls bring open talent, freelancers, and organizations in these spheres together to change the world of work. In Thursday 15^th September’s call, Tim Sanders, VP of Client Strategy at Upwork shared highlights and findings from Upwork’s Future Workforce Report 2022: Leveraging Independent Talent as a Key Workforce Strategy.

As with a lot of business projects, the capability of an innovation program is often directly linked to its level of maturity. By ‘maturity’ here, we don’t necessarily mean the length of time that a company has been using an innovation program – although progress in this area does require a certain amount of time to become established.

In our last blog, we looked at metrics maturity and how companies turn performance reporting into an optimized part of an innovation strategy. A key factor to bear in mind when devising a strategy for any innovation program is the regularity with which these metrics are being reviewed.

Looking across the business world at large, it’s apparent that most organizations aren’t at a stage where innovation reporting is optimized. Innovation metrics maturity often depends on how long an organization has been reporting on innovation activity in the first place.

At the start of any organization’s efforts to innovate more effectively and sustainably, processes need to be put in place that ensure new ideas don’t get ignored or forgotten about before they can be implemented.

Every day I am lucky enough to see organisations tap into the brilliant minds of people inside and outside their networks to solve the world’s most pressing problems. From preventing the spread of malaria, to identifying new and sustainable way to power societies, we witness ideas coming from the most unlikely places, giving us confidence that the collective experience, intelligence, and perseverance of humanity is enough to overcome the most complex challenges.

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

The crisis in many parts of the world concerning the lack of available drinking water is only getting worse year after year. As it stands, around 768 million people worldwide cannot access this fundamental resource and, as the effects of climate change worsen and pollution continues, this figure is only going to increase.

When we think of disruptors, we think about bold new start-ups like Netflix or Airbnb.