How to achieve the right velocity for your innovation efforts

What was once a good aspiration has now become a must-have for many companies. I'm talking, of course, about innovation. These days (and especially since the pandemic began), the ability to adapt to new challenges has become essential. Adjusting workflows, products and services, launching new products to meet new demands and adopting new approaches to doing business are now requirements for every company.

What’s more, the new scenario doesn’t just demand this innovation – it demands it at the fastest possible pace. This is why so many companies are now racing to implement new technologies – they are trying to keep up.

Unfortunately, these hasty attempts can do more harm than good. Why? Because many companies focus on speed above all else, which sometimes means sacrificing essential aspects like security, privacy or scalability. Prioritizing speed above all else can also lead to vendor lock-in or extensive technical debt that becomes nearly impossible to pay off later.

Of course, companies that are accelerating technology adoption may have digital solutions before others. But without taking care of these sacrifices, they end up having negative long-term consequences, including rigid technology, lost productivity and, ultimately, reduced flexibility – exactly the opposite of what companies need to thrive right now!

I'm not trying to say that companies should move at whatever pace they want with their technological innovation. On the contrary, they need to be as fast as possible, but not at the expense of other important qualities of this process. It's a difficult balance to achieve, but it's certainly not impossible, especially if you follow the suggestions below.

Embrace hybrid and multi-cloud computing

This way, you can still create custom solutions to completely reimagine your operations from scratch, but you can also quickly transform to start meeting current demands now. Embracing cloud computing , then, is the best way to leverage today's digital solutions without waiting for long development cycles to end. This provides the infrastructure you need to innovate right now without sacrificing anything, as you are also simultaneously working on a more definitive and customized solution.

It is important to note that adopting cloud computing does not mean adopting just any option. Different cloud providers offer different things, so you might also want to research them before committing to one. In fact, you should consider using multiple clouds to avoid vendor lock-in while still taking advantage of their diverse capabilities. What's more, if you have some on-premises infrastructure to support these cloud offerings, you can further empower your cloud strategy. This is especially useful if you have sensitive information that you need to keep secure and private.

Empower your engineering teams

When it comes to acceleration and digital solutions, your innovation strategy depends almost exclusively on your engineering talent. However, many companies still emphasize their engineering talent, pressuring them to be fast, innovative and high-performing without any compromise. That's a recipe for disaster. If you do this, your engineers will burn out quickly, which in turn will cause them to lose productivity and make more mistakes.

That's why you need to take feedback from your engineering team seriously and base your decisions on it. This means understanding how you can contribute to improving their work while also paying attention to their opinions about your approach to all innovation activities. You may find that you need to review schedules, juggle different projects, or adjust workflows.

This can also mean providing your engineers with new capabilities to increase their productivity and efficiency. For innovation to thrive, engineering teams need the best tools on the market for the job at hand. Additionally, they may need additional talent to help them with specific aspects of their projects. If that's the case, you can always hire new employees or use staffing services to hire temporary help. Whichever path you take, remember that seeking a diverse team always drives innovation.

Make privacy, security and scalability your priorities

There is a feeling that companies innovate quickly, without thinking twice about privacy, security or even the medium and long term future. This “move fast and break things” mentality focuses exclusively on quickly delivering solutions to satisfy new needs and provide innovative services. The problem is that privacy, security and scalability cannot be treated as secondary features that can be sacrificed.

People today demand rapid innovations, but they never want them at the expense of their privacy or security. While it is true that including security and privacy features in solutions can slow development down a bit, the consequences of not developing these features can be disastrous. Which is better: an immediate innovation that has multiple vulnerabilities or an innovation a month from now that has more robust security implemented?

I could say something similar about scalability. Innovating for today without thinking twice about tomorrow can quickly render those innovations useless. This is because a solution without solid foundations and a robust architecture can be problematic to adjust later. Imagine you launch an innovative solution that becomes extremely popular and forces you to grow. If you don't have the right foundation in place, you will have to rework the entire solution and waste more time than you would have if you had developed it with scalability in mind.

You need to go faster, but not too fast

What you should take away from all this is that speed is an important factor in developing innovative solutions, but it is far from the only one. The best solutions available are those that bring new features and possibilities without sacrificing quality, privacy, security and scalability.

It's true that getting all of these things right will take longer than it would if you ignored them, but that's okay. You need to act fast, but not so fast that you lose sight of the important things related to innovation.

Fortunately, you have several ways to do this: empowering your team, leveraging the cloud, and establishing clear priorities are a few of them. There are certainly more but pursuing them is the best start to achieving the right speed for your innovation efforts without sacrificing anything important.