Your digital innovation projects carry strong ambitions for your organizations. Their achievement requires the formation of dedicated teams to meet multiple challenges: technologies, uses, economic models, processes, etc.
Your “ideal” digital innovation team must therefore bring together a set of expertises and know-how as broad as unique to embody your vision, take ownership of your objectives, build your solution and ensure its implementation.
To better paint the portrait of this ideal team, let's pause for a moment on what its mission will be. What do we mean by digital innovation? The definitions are multiple. Internal tools, connected objects, websites, mobile applications, tailor-made algorithms, data management strategies… everyone looks through their own prism.
Digital innovation is defined as a solution in the broad sense and not just as a product. It combines three characteristics:
- It presents a strong challenge for your organization (taking or resuming leadership, diversifying its activity, opening new markets, improving uses, etc.)
- It must quickly generate success in a market
- It is likely to impact all departments of the company (from Brand to Marketing, from development teams to after-sales service and many others)
Digital innovation differs from digital transformation, which corresponds to a completely different need, often very focused on the forced adaptation of an organization to digital. But the two are linked. To keep all its promises, digital transformation benefits from relying on digital innovation projects that complement and energize it by opening up new opportunities.
Between your digital innovation team and you, it takes trust, transparency, osmosis, sparks and more. Because the first thing to expect from this team is a state of mind: an ability to stimulate the dynamic essential to the success of digital innovation projects.
In this context, the personalities that make up your team are extremely important. The diversity of expertise, profiles, their complementarity, their versatility and their experience are key.
I-Percut Co-founder, CEO and CTO
Turning a complex idea into reality within a few months is what the BeTomorrow team helped us achieve! They are fast, technically robust, and make relevant choices in user experience and design. We found an expert partner for the development of our connected product. We have been working with their highly professional multidisciplinary team.
Today, certain expertise is essential to be able to claim to work on a digital innovation project and join a dedicated team.
Of course, you have the option of relying on an external partner to build your digital innovation project team. This must tick all the boxes mentioned: complementarity between team members, integration of expertise and posture of “solution-oriented challenger”. But that's not all.
Other selection factors should be taken into account to guarantee you a team of maximum efficiency on innovative projects:
Going from ideas to technical realization requires method, expertise, experience but also and above all excellence on a daily basis and at all levels! Excellence in code, excellence in design, excellence in infrastructure and data structuring: each role, each expert must be permeated by this perpetual quest.
Look at the projects in detail, ask to audit the code, think about the submerged aspect of the digital iceberg before choosing your partner. Ask to exchange without intermediary with the developers on the technologies used, their quality method.
Your ambitions in terms of digital innovation require constant questioning, a quest for continuous improvement on the part of the teams. Monitoring, deepening and sharing knowledge, experimentation must be in your partner's DNA. Ask him how he organizes himself on this subject!
BeTomorrow has developed its own tool for sharing, enriching and capitalizing on knowledge between peers: Skillagora helps create the conditions for optimal team organization and commitment.
Digital innovation projects are supported by agile methods. These allow, better than a specification accompanied by a fixed commitment, to bring projects to fruition. This is true both in terms of respecting deadlines and budgets as well as in terms of commercial success and adoption of the solution. Such a result is obtained by a total application of the concepts of agility and an appropriation of its values by the members of the team. Ask your partner to describe concrete situations where their mastery of agility has made a difference.
The number of years of experience of the professionals offered to you matters. Nobody wants to be made available to a team of young graduates all propelled Lead Developer overnight. Yet it happens! A fair ratio between junior and more experienced profiles guarantees a good balance in the team.
Beyond this general principle, a look at other criteria will strengthen your confidence in the profiles offered:
Nobody can control it: the choice of a partner is also made partly by feeling. This reflects a know-how and a connivance on our favorite subjects. Come and visit their headquarters, meet the whole team and not just your first contacts.
Pay attention to first impressions. These are often the good ones!
You can also check if your partner is classified as a “happy at work” agency.
There are two opposing approaches among service providers likely to offer their skills to build your digital innovation project teams. “IT Services Company” providers place people individually in your organizations to meet a given skill need. The agencies, for their part, provide you with a turnkey team where versatile profiles are accustomed to working together.
Choosing an agency is therefore choosing a team, a state of mind, a culture, as sports training does.
It is the certainty of having a guarantor: as initiators of innovative digital projects, you benefit from all the experience of the agency in other sectors. It helps you to step back and enrich your vision at each stage of the project, depending on the composition of your own teams and your challenges.
The benefits can be the following:
- Unblocking a bogged down strategic project
- The formalization of a start-up idea and its embodiment to find funding
- Surgical optimization of a customer experience already generating several million euros in revenue
- The launch by a leader of a complementary activity
- An outsourced innovation lab to carry out ad-hoc projects
- Sharing skills through training
The tailor-made joint working methods are refined over the life cycle of the project. In any case, the chosen team must be able to deal with these different points:
• Upstream framing (business canvas, brand strategy, core experience, target user interviews, pitch presentation to funders, etc.)
- Audit on specific aspects: IT due diligence, code audit, application audit
• Special missions: Data analytics, ServerLess, DataViz, Brand creation, Design Thinking workshop…
• IT development: code recovery or redesign, improvement and corrective maintenance, development of hybrid or native mobile applications, development of websites or application solutions
• Go To Market: strategy, management
• Innovation lab: help with structuring, outsourced innovation lab, partnerships
Digital innovation agencies are also distinguished by their ability to adjust the composition of their team and to mobilize a wide variety of experts depending on the progress of a project.
Through your digital innovation projects, you commit a budget, resources, reputation or the development of your company or one of its activities. This justifies the attention paid to the constitution of the team and the wide range of criteria to be taken into account. Without abusing the sport metaphor, it is a question of having very good (if not the best) elements in each position, capable of “playing collectively”. Beyond the skills, it is also a question of having a workforce with which you will establish a certain complicity. An essential point to adapt to the necessarily changing circumstances of digital innovation projects.