(Original creator: jhuggins1)
In this blog series I’ve covered how innovation can be evolutionary, but what does this look like in the real world?
Mobile technology is a great example of the power of evolutionary innovation, and is proving to be a major way of doing things better. Although mobile apps may have been just a fun distraction until relatively recently, companies increasingly see them as a way of unlocking their enterprise. In some environments, such as academia, users have already come to expect the applications they use to be accessible via mobile devices – and consumerization means this is increasingly the case across the board. What’s more, provision of mobile support often needs to happen fast.
Mobile lends itself to evolutionary approaches
You can add a lot of value by simply delivering existing applications’ business functionality via a mobile device, especially given they are typically always on and at hand 24x7. Porting key business tasks to mobile is a prime example of evolutionary innovation, especially as putting functionality on a mobile device can unlock many more innovative ideas. These could be as simple as capturing expenses on the fly, putting an end to lost receipts and time-consuming monthly admin. Ideas could also be more ambitious. For example, a retailer could use location data to avoid missed deliveries and present alternative drop-off locations should the customer be away from home. Today, we already see notifications being heavily used to maximize the efficiency of deliveries. With the right development platform, you can do this without much additional overhead. The team can focus on building good, responsive applications that can be deployed across platforms, whether desktop, web or mobile. It is worth noting that for mobile apps, you don’t have to deliver the whole enterprise solution, just key processes that are relevant to the mobile platform. For example, in an HR application you can save a lot of time and money by putting holiday or expenses approvals on a manager’s phone. This is far more efficient than checking emails and possibly forgetting to act, as they can do the job with one or two touches in response to a notification.
Mobile promotes innovation
What we’ve just described can be truly innovative and evolutionary because you go back to basics. You start by thinking about what’s going on in a manager’s day and what they need to work smarter. You then enable that vision one bite at a time, reusing functionality you already have.
As well as reusing your existing solutions on mobile, you can also innovate by combining them with other technology. For example, a mobile device can continually gather information about location and other aspects of the user’s situation, presenting the right options when most appropriate. You can take advantage of all this real-time information to make your applications better. For example:
A salesperson could be alerted when they are in the neighborhood of a new lead.
While a shop assistant is talking to a customer, the assistant’s augmented reality glasses could feed live facts about products they’re looking at.
A building automation app could use geolocation information to manage lighting, heating and security as a person navigates the location.
A choice of approaches
Mobile innovation can pay big dividends. How evolutionary it is depends partly on the approach you adopt. Possible approaches range from native device development through to mobile web sites. Each has its pros and cons. By taking a pragmatic view, it is possible to combine the best aspects of different approaches.
A hybrid approach combines native and mobile web development, arguably giving you the best of both worlds. It yields opportunities to reuse much of your current functionality and team skills, while also taking advantage of device features. This opens up many innovative ways to improve user experience and efficiency when using the business application.
This series is based on the paper: Agility and Innovation in Application and Mobile Development.
You can download the paper here.