Cross-industry innovation is a smart way to enhance your innovation efforts by learning from other sectors,
transferring approaches and technological ideas beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area, or domain.

DigiTaiken

• 6 min Read

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How can the combination of previously unconnected technologies benefit your company?

Can the airline sector apply safety principles from a hospital?

Can a car manufacturer learn from the video game industry?

When it comes to problem-solving, there’s a good chance that someone has already found the answer you’re looking for. Be it products, services, technology, strategy, or business model solutions, you just need to find analogous inspiration and translate them to meet the company’s needs.

Cross-industry innovation is a smart way to enhance your innovation efforts by learning from other sectors, transferring approaches and technological ideas beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area, or domain. Ground-breaking innovations have emerged from cross-industry collaboration, such as fibre optics: a result of the fusion of glass, cable, and electronics technologies.

Nowadays organizations face increased challenges when keeping up with the changing need of their customers and applying the highest-value innovations. Investing in cross-innovation can give you a competitive edge and contribute to your strategic roadmap:

• See your business from a whole different perspective and define new approaches to existing challenges.
• Leverage other industries’ insights and knowledge, lowering risk by building upon proven ideas.
• Generate more ideas, faster. New insights fuel new ideas.
• Close the gap between departments and customer segments to deliver real innovation.
• Create meaningful experiences perceiving how customers respond to similar changes in other sectors.

In short, cross-innovation can help find new ways of operating and capitalise on business opportunities, increasing a company’s competitiveness to stay ahead or take over the market. So, if you’re looking to add the highest-value innovation for your organization, don’t just think outside the box, think outside your industry.

These are three tactics executive leaders can adopt for successful cross-industry innovation:

1. Identify innovative business models in other industries: keeping an eye on disruptions within other industries can deliver new value propositions to your organization. Innovative business models can be transferred from the public to the private sector, from one industry to another, or any other combination. Appointing a small research team to look for digital innovations outside the organization’s field of action can prove itself worth it.
2. Accelerate innovation by partnering with others: Digital business has enabled cross-industry ecosystems that allow for close coordination between specialists, delivering information exchange, aggregating value propositions and IP. Finding the right partners to innovate is not always easy, but it’s essential to successfully pinpoint new growth opportunities.
3. Consider counterintuitive ways to innovate: Going against what common sense would suggest is not always a bad idea. In fact, this way of think can reveal new opportunities and possibilities, leading to untapped revenue streams.

Creating new value propositions has never been easier. Either taking learnings from one industry and applying them in another or taking new capabilities and processes from digital business evolution and multi-industry ecosystems, you can empower your company with new customer value in untapped markets or with new products and channels.

Still wondering how cross-innovation can help your enterprise fortify for digital-era competition and capitalise on business opportunities?

Reach us at sales@digitaiken.com