Take the leap to form creative partnerships and scale innovation

Creativity unbound is an ecosystem affair, demanding contributions from business, operations, and technology teams as well as orchestrating value with external partners. As a technology leader, you must prepare your organization to lead the charge on tech-driven innovations, participating fully in your firm’s creativity practices. 

Chances are high you may find yourself in one of these three common scenarios: 

• Realizing a digital transformation. You may have already embarked on a major transformation initiative — or have made the corporate decision to set out on one. You may have worked with a consulting firm to define the overall objectives and roadmap. Now you are tasked to ensure that the initiative will be linked to identifiable business value. 

• Scaling innovation out of the lab. You may have successfully experimented with new approaches or new technologies (or, quite often, both) in the lab — perhaps in a co-creation and co-innovation center of a consulting or service partner. Now that it works in the lab, you’re keen to scale this innovation across your organization successfully. 

• Changing culture and ways of working. You may be well on your way with technology transformation initiatives. But you realize that your approach might be a bit lopsided, and your initiative has been largely technology-focused. Now you realize that something is missing and look to better balance your technology investments with investments in culture shaping and new ways of working. 

Elevate Your Ability To Solve Problems 

Across all three scenarios, your key challenge is elevating your organization’s abilities to be creative and solve multifaceted problems. Fortunately, you are not alone. A new breed of specialist innovation partners has built up expertise and instruments to help you in your quest. These partners are not your typical outsourcing and service providers anymore — they have changed how they work with you in a value-driven, cooperative approach. Such partnerships are a pathway to your future fit strategy, which pivots your organization to be more adaptive, resilient, and creative. 

Build Your Creative Teams Together 

Working with these co-innovation partners will allow you to orchestrate internal and external ecosystems. That’s a departure from traditional engagement models that you may still be experiencing. You will be building joint nimble, creative teams and establishing the right conditions for them to thrive. Your partnership will be based on trust, transparency, and value alignment. 

To learn more about how creative partnerships work, how to select the right people for co-innovation teams, and how to create empowering conditions that pave the wave to success, please join Forrester at Technology & Innovation North America on November 2 and 3.

Principal Analyst Achim Granzen wrote this post, and it originally appeared here.