Creativity and innovation are essential for businesses that wants to keep moving forward. Many experts believe that risk-averse corporate cultures, a lack of strategy, funding and management support results in innovation deprivation in organizations. However, when companies use the ‘open culture’ approach, it will result into a significant increase in collective output and will ultimately lead to breakthrough innovations. Companies need to stimulate live collaboration and create an open culture of constantly sharing, work on challenges, collect feedback, develop new products and improve the company strategy. Here is where live collaboration for innovation comes in
With the COVID-19 pandemic permanently altering the way organizations manage and collaborate, many have realized how effective live collaboration tools can be especially when it comes to improving the innovation output. According to the recent McKinsey & Co. global survey, corporates are pushing more for automation. Terms like AI and machine learning are becoming a common thing nowadays. The focus is shifting towards employee satisfaction, idea generation, skill-building, and teamwork-driven environment.
Now that businesses have started going through a digital transformation more and more, Live Collaboration is what everyone is talking about.
What is live collaboration?
Live collaboration is the process of connecting various users from different locations to participate in diverse projects/initiatives online (digitally). It allows people to communicate, collaborate and manage projects efficiently. It provides relevant stakeholders & team members with same real time information and keeps projects organized and on schedule.
Why is it important?
Live collaboration is important to let people collaborate efficiently with better results. Just as digitalization, innovation is becoming more and more important. You need to adapt better and faster to internal and/or external changes and opportunities. Every company need solutions to collaborate faster and share ideas, solve problems, and build outstanding strategies.
According to PGI, business collaboration allows organizations to be more competitive globally. This results in a 35% increase in innovation and creativity in the workplace.
Use case
Use live collaboration tools to work together time and/or place independent to capture and improve ideas. Use the platform to collaborate with your colleagues or stakeholders physically, digitally or hybrid (in a physical room with a big screen and laptops). Capture and improve ideas to share your ideas, solve problems and sharpen strategies.
Nowadays, traditional brainstorming has a risky downside. It costs more time, energy, and money to organize these sessions compared to using a live collaboration platform. You can host an online session with your colleagues and/or stakeholders, place independent. As the platform is updated real-time, you’re no longer bound by session schedules, but you can pick up where your colleague left off.
Live collaboration platforms have surpassed traditional brainstorming with new features. They has reinvented idea generation with the use of gamification techniques like gaining experience points, going undercover to brainstorm, sending reminders, starting challenges, publishing leaderboards or setting goals. Many extra features can be used online to organize ideas, select and/or further develop them.
Workforce integration
In companies with a traditional top-down organization structure, their conservative company culture can be a barrier for idea generation. Live collaboration helps to encourage employees to collaborate across departments and levels. It creates idea bubbles and brings employees with diverse strengths and perspectives together. This synergy enables information to move freely across the organization, stimulating the innovative capacity.
Idea generation
Live collaboration stimulates employees to work together and generate new ideas. They can share experiences, ask questions, like, review, score, and even praise peer ideas. It helps people improve the quality of ideas without having the fear of any judgment or rejection.
Ideation – idea challenges
With live collaboration, organizations can introduce and expand the concept of ideation. You can share ideas, work on projects and discuss new products openly with employees, partners and/or customers. This way, they will become part of your development team (a trusted committee) and you can collect valuable feedback at an early stage, even from clients.
Fast-paced innovation
Live collaboration leads to fast-paced innovation. You can solve complex issues faster by inviting a diverse group of people with different backgrounds, expertises and skills. When everyone is up-to-date on a project’s progress, you will get a better perspective on new opportunities, occurring challenges and projected outcomes. It allows you to discuss more details upfront and coordinate the implementation to better solutions.
Idea management
Live collaboration allows you to utilize every team member’s knowledge, experience and skills involved in a project efficiently. It enables you to work together, be creative and improve ideas altogether. For instance: if someone with a great idea isn’t a good presenter, live collaboration provides an open platform to complement each others strengths. Additionally, its idea-storing feature empowers you to manage it systematically, allowing you to work on it later on.
Knowledge management
Live collaboration enables you to create profiles based on knowledge and expertise. You can create ideas based on shared knowledge, trends and developments and utilize them to achieve better results. It also increases the employee satisfaction rate. For example: when you connect and discuss a specific subject, your employees will feel invited to contribute with their unique input based on their skillsets, and feel appreciated doing so.
Idea selection and decision-making
Most live collaboration tools have built-in powerful reporting features. They offer clear insights on projects. It’s smart to track the process, select the most effective idea based on the reports and measure the innovation success rate. It empowers you to make smart and quick decisions.
Advantages of live collaboration for your organization
- Clear Communication, Less Confusion: Live collaboration is visual communication with real-time updates. It provides better interaction in your meetings.
- Saves Time: Live collaboration is time efficient and independent. It eliminates unnecessary time having to arrange meetings with different groups of people. Also, it saves time wasted in long interdepartmental e-mail communications.
- Improves Quality: Your generated knowledge, ideas or problems are directly saved on the platform when you’re working with collaboration tools. The information is automatically stored, there is no loss of content and it can easily be enriched by others.
- Increases Productivity: Live collaboration tools enable people to work from any location, whether it is from home or from overseas office locations. Collaborate on projects place-independently, without compromising on productivity.
- Boosts Creativity: Combining ideas from all invited employees on one platform will boost creativity, inspiring those who read others’ ideas.
- Saves Money, Increases Value: All these advantages together benefit your organization financially. Live collaboration helps your organization save money by cutting away inefficiency and increasing value output considerably.
How to use live collaboration tools?
88% of the millennials prefer a collaborative work culture. Now is the right time for organizations to create collaborative workplaces to leverage the talents of their employees.
Here are six steps to create a collaborative workplace using live collaboration tools to boost your innovation:
- Step – 1 Share your company goals and challenges openly and transparently. Ask your employees about their ideas and how to achieve them.
- Step – 2 Create a safe space for creative thinking. Ideas flourish when there is no fear of judgment or rejection.
- Step – 3 Encourage collaboration on a project across different departments, levels, skills-sets, and groups of people. Successful idea generation needs a 360-degree view of a situation, by engaging people both internally and externally.
- Step – 4 Adopt an open-door policy and lead your team from the top. When employees see their managers and directors collaborating effectively, it inspires them to replicate that behavior.
- Step – 5 To encourage future collaborations, reward the achievers. Rewards can be anything: recognition, perks, monetary rewards or a celebration. Remember, though, that not all ideas will be innovative. Be persistent in rendering feedback to employees with failed ideas. Offer constructive criticism with a positive tone and tell them how they can improve in the future.
- Step – 6 Invest in the appropriate technology to facilitate live collaboration and help employees do their job efficiently. The right live collaboration platform can be a game-changer for innovation.
How you can innovate with live collaboration
#1. Work efficient with live teams
Live working can be tough, so ensure you have an inclusive team lead who engages all team members. You can assess the strength and weaknesses of your team members and select compatible partners. Assign a common objective and a roadmap including individual goals and responsibilities. It will help them feel comfortable with the tools they are using and keep things organized.
#2. Motivate and engage with advanced technologies and tools
Having the right technology in place can help employees do their jobs faster. Whenever you select a live collaboration platform, ensure to check for features like
- Cross-platform compatibility for idea management
- The facility of different inboxes for better idea categorization
- Idea drag & drop options
- Real-time insight options
- Project tracking
- Notifications and file management
- Overview of an innovation portfolio roadmap
- Smart templates for ideation
- Privacy features
Stay ahead with cloud-based software and other technological advances to keep your employees engaged and motivated. Pick the right tool for your team’s needs and capabilities, as this can aid in better idea generation.
#3. Define the ideation process
Make sure each team member has defined roles in the project. When you facilitate a discussion, ensure all team members maintain respectful communication with each other. Cultivate openness and transparency throughout the entire process: from inviting people to validating an idea and giving feedback. Offer constructive criticism and if someone provides a valuable idea, reward them.
#4. Gamification to boost engagement and creativity
Gamification has the power to trigger various human emotions and awaken creativity. It is fun and fosters competition. It helps to boost the team spirit and make collaboration more effective. You can use it to create a sense of control in people, letting them decide which goals they will complete next.
#5. Use the right live collaboration platform
A live collaboration platform empowers you to engage people from different teams, locations, or even countries. It delivers a steady flow of progressive quality ideas that help you with progress and innovation. You can regularly use live collaboration tools to build ideation campaigns for small or big groups and pique their interest with gamification features. The more you use a platform, the more you will get out of it.
How innovation software (Accept Mission) can help
Live collaboration with boards
Accept Mission is an innovative platform that allows people to share ideas and work together. We are committed to developing new tools that make the innovation process more effective and deliver more value to customers. Our latest Accept Mission tool, ‘Boards’, is a live collaboration solution that gives you the opportunity to:
· Connect with people from different teams and locations
· Collect ideas continuously and share insights into potential innovation successes
· Measure and improve performance directly with powerful reports
· Provide a complete overview of the innovation portfolio by tracking progress step-by-step
· Enable the team to analyse and solve challenges together
· Facilitate quick idea additions and strategy sharpening
· Build ideation campaigns with multiple objectives, privacy mode, and reporting
· Empower idea selection and smart decision making by validating solutions/propositions to customers or end-users
Live collaboration with ideation campaigns
Ideation is the start of innovation projects that can lead to competitive advantages or open whole new gateways for companies. Ideation can be defined as “the formation of ideas or concepts”. A strong ideation is needed to start an innovation project and optimize its outcome, since the generated ideas shape the entire innovation.
A strong ideation is important to innovation. When it’s poorly executed, bad ideas will be generated and the innovations will be fed with these poor ideas. Better ideas will be generated by optimizing ideation, which will evidently lead to a better start to the innovation project. If the innovation project is fueled by better ideas, there is a higher chance it will lead to a better result.
Ideation also makes sure that obvious solutions won’t always be the best approach. It is key to look further than the first ‘logical’ idea that you think of. With ideation, many ideas are generated and chances are that there is an equally good or better idea among the results.
Avatars – People love using avatars! In live collaboration, we offer an ‘Undercover’ mode, where customers and employees can brainstorm together without knowing who is on the other side of the screen.
Timer – A timer gives a timeframe for people to participate and submit ideas. It ensures that quality and effective ideas get more rewards and recognition.
Leader boards – The members with the best ideas rank on top of the leaderboard. This motivates your team to compete and perform better for higher ranking.
Reminders and Experience Points – This helps to engage participants in projects and motivate them to contribute ideas frequently.
Conclusion
Innovating with live collaboration is more effective and increases idea-sharing with transparent interaction between colleagues. It encourages an open and creative culture in which all ideas are acknowledged. You can maintain a high level of live collaboration leading to your organization’s fast innovation with advanced digital tools like Accept Mission: BOARDS.
You can use our application to organize your brainstorming sessions at any time, place, and on any device you like. We offer many templates that you can use to build your ‘Mission.’ You can bring the right people together and even invite people with the ‘Automated-Innovation Mission.’
Sounds interesting?
Find out how Accept Mission and our new smart idea management tool can optimize your company’s Ideation and Idea Management.
