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What Every Business Can Learn From Great Product Innovators

Peter Karlson is the founder of NeuEon, a company focused on business and technology transformation. Many traditional companies in sectors like distribution, manufacturing and insurance are taking a hard look at their vendor and technology stacks to see if they can do better. From a CIO perspective, outsourcing elements of IT infrastructure is often a smart move—especially for commoditized functions like communications and collaboration platforms. Consider how common it once was to host in-house email servers; today, migration to cloud-based solutions is the norm. But there's a catch. How Modern Innovation Techniques Add Value I recently spoke with a company that had been an early adopter of an AI tool meant to streamline workflows and save on labor costs. Now, that cost savings has flipped into a major budget line item—approaching seven figures annually. Their comment? 'We should build it ourselves.' That instinct makes sense—but it's not so simple, especially for companies operating with legacy IT people, processes and platforms. It takes a cultural shift to begin thinking like an innovation factory rather than a traditional factory. There's a lot to learn from how technology companies continuously innovate and deliver customer-focused products. When Outsourcing Starts To Cost Too Much In many organizations, internal IT teams still use an outdated "MIS" mindset—where the same people who build the systems also run them, and all the changes must go through them. This gatekeeping stifles innovation and delays the deployment of business-critical solutions. The opposite approach can be just as problematic: The business purchases a slew of off-the-shelf tools and either dumps integration on IT or leaves them siloed, requiring manual data transfers. Lessons From The Tech Industry When new leadership steps in, they often face massive project backlogs and multiyear road maps to deliver key functionality. To counter this, some forward-thinking leaders are launching innovation groups separate from the main IT function. These dedicated teams operate with the agility that today's business environment demands. Key Questions To Gauge Readiness The first step is to understand how your internal teams build solutions today. Ask yourself a few leading questions like: • Are they consistently delivering value? • Do they have a customer-centric culture? • Are they using modern tools and techniques? If the answer to any of these is 'no,' you likely need to prioritize building an innovation culture before you try to deliver innovative products. Building A Customer-Centric Innovation Culture Traditional IT departments often focus on 'keeping the lights on.' That only works if your business doesn't face frequent change. But change is the new constant—competition improves, customer needs shift and costs rise. Your systems must evolve accordingly. To meet this demand, companies need a mindset shift—one that mirrors how technology companies operate. With a business agility focus, you can identify change, fund it appropriately and deliver results faster than competitors, without sacrificing profit or market share. Assessing Your Innovation Assets Start by evaluating the people responsible for developing solutions, their processes and the quality of their output. Review your team's backgrounds, education and experience. Go a step further: Assess their personality traits like curiosity, creativity and risk tolerance. Personality traits shape how your team innovates and collaborates. Next, look at how they work. Do they use waterfall, agile or hybrid methodologies? Who translates business needs into concrete solutions? How quickly do they build, test and deploy solutions? Finally, assess the outcome. Does it solve real problems? Is the interface intuitive? Is the system fast? And ultimately, do your users enjoy using it? The Road Ahead This is just the beginning of the innovation journey. In future articles, I'll explore and provide specific techniques that companies can use to accelerate corporate innovation, including the following: • Generating and capturing new ideas • Evaluating feasibility, desirability and viability • Developing business cases for high-potential concepts • Using agile, iterative testing to validate solutions that stakeholders will value Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?