By Javier Hernandez (ERNI Spain)
In the ever-changing world of technology, we constantly face the challenge of innovating, thinking outside of the box, and keeping up with the latest technological and human trends. Innovation is a hot topic. Many professionals talk about how necessary it is for any organization, but how are they innovating?
Why innovation matters and where it begins
It seems so easy when you hear from people who are already doing it, but what if we want to innovate, too? Is an innovator born or made? Innovation isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; we need to understand the context of our organizations, the strengths we have, and the skills we can easily develop.
At ERNI, we believe that innovation is not just a buzzword; it’s a necessity.
Our goal is to bring new innovative ideas to our customers and test the capabilities of new technologies, focusing on how they can provide an advantage to our customers.
To be innovative, we need to ask ourselves: How are we organized? What is our context? How can we take advantage of our knowledge and resources? Where are unmet needs, problems, and opportunities? Are we leading our market? How can we stay ahead? Answering these questions is key to understanding how we could develop our innovation capabilities.
We must also consider the unmet needs, problems, and opportunities in our clients’ respective markets and ask the question: How can our technology and software innovations help our clients enhance their products and services? Just as we’ve implemented technology that has changed the face of cybersecurity in the MedTech space, we’re constantly working to identify any problems and use technology to innovate and create opportunities for all of our clients across the world.
How ERNI innovates: From insight to impact
At ERNI, we first took advantage of our organizational model and contextual strengths. For example, as a global technology consultancy firm, we benefit from working closely with our customers. Our consultants experience our customers’ challenges and needs first-hand.
In addition, our Sales team is able to follow market trends. Where are big companies investing? How is the start-up ecosystem behaving? Our Principal Engineers, thanks to their curiosity and proactiveness, stay up to date with new technology trends, experimenting with them to identify their potential uses.
Once we’ve gathered significant information, how can we make the most of it? We’ve developed a compact framework named Shape the Market to address this, based on the famous Shape Up framework developed by Ryan Singer.
Its principle is simple: it makes us collaborate, share, and create new solutions and POCs. We meet every seven weeks to share what we’ve learned: What are the new technology trends? Where are markets investing? What challenges have we observed? In this ideation session, we let creativity flow, generating ideas (even the craziest ones!) to come up with possible POCs, experiments, or solutions that could be interesting for our customers and the market they are in.
The output of this session is a set of ideas, and then we have one week to develop these ideas and create a more specific proposal. For that, we take into account—and this is important—ERNI’s context and reality:
We not only develop these ideas but also think about how to validate their expected value and impact, and we evaluate their cost and feasibility.
Questions such as Which challenge are we solving?, Why is this relevant to our customers or the market? or Do we have the people and resources needed to develop the idea? are critical to deciding if we should bet on the idea and move forward. And ‘bet’ is the word: with these proposals, we meet again and decide where to bet what are the most powerful and impactful proposals we want to start building.
We spend a maximum of six weeks building the idea, and our principles are simple: we focus on creating a POC that gives value and solves a challenge over keeping the original scope or creating bug-free software.
Our goal is to validate our hypothesis and impact the market; we want to help our customers and society to innovate and learn.
After these seven weeks, the process starts again, fueled by what we’ve learned from the market and customers’ feedback.
The results: Real innovation with real value
Thanks to developing our strengths and a lightweight process, we created an innovative AI tool that boosts how companies can define requirements and refine them for software teams, making them more efficient and effective (https://github.com/ERNI-Academy/refinaida), or improve the way our software teams address accessibility in the solutions we develop and advance ourselves to the current social and legal trends.
Innovation is not just about creating new technologies; it’s about making a meaningful impact. At ERNI, we are dedicated to empowering people through technology and driving impactful change. By staying ahead of market trends and developing innovative solutions, we continue to Shape the Market and create a competitive advantage for our customers.
If you’re interested in how emerging technologies are shaping industries, explore our article on the union of AI and computer vision in modern manufacturing. It highlights how innovation in this field is transforming production processes and unlocking new efficiencies.