innovation – Payapars

What is a Hackathon?

محمد مداحی — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 08:18:40 +0000

There are a lot of new words floating in the air and most often than not, you find yourself in a position when you feel slightly embarrassed because you cannot tune in a conversation. Due to the fact that our world works at a fast pace, you should be ahead of new trends in order to live efficiently in the 21^st century. In recent years on the event scene, there are special types of events called – Hackathons. If you are not aware of this term continue reading this short summary!

In its core meaning a Hackathon is a gathering where programmers collaboratively code in a competitive way over a short period of time – a few days or over the course of only one day. While working on a particular project, the idea is for everybody to have the freedom to think and work on whatever they find important. The goal of a hackathon is to create usable software or hardware with the initial idea of creating a functioning product by the end of the event.

There are speculations whether OpenBSD or the JavaOne conference from June 15 to June 19, 1999, were the first to organize their work by the principals behind a hackathon. However, starting around the mid to late 2000s, hackathons became significantly widespread and were used by companies as a quick way to develop new software technologies. Nevertheless, it was not only narrowed to technological development. Many business ventures used hackathons to locate new areas for funding or innovation.

Structure

The structure of a hackathon is something diverse; you can play with in order to truly match your interests. Anyway, they typically start with one or more presentations about the event. Then participants suggest ideas and form teams, based on individual interests and skills. For hackathons that last 24 hours or longer, especially competitive ones, eating is often informal and participants often chug on food like pizza or fizzy drinks. Sometimes sleeping is informal too and participants sleep on-site with sleeping bags. Yet again there are hackathons where everything is sponsored and quality meals are served or proper housing is provided. At the end of a hackathon, there are usually demonstrations, which each group presents. The event is often accompanied by postings on social media, blogs, vlogs and hashtags. There is sometimes a panel of judges made up of organisers and sponsors. Usually, the winner/winners receive an award and it can vary from a fun trophy to more serious awards such as money or a contract.

How this can help your internal innovation and motivation?

If you have a company and you are stuck on a problem/you want to develop a new product, but you need the whole process to be fast enough so as to avoid losing precious time, then the Hackathon is the perfect remedy for your concerns. As you understood Hackathons are part of tech culture. But they are a playground for exploring new and exciting possibilities. With hackathons, you can take the market insights you have noted, translate them into themes and problem topics, and start producing ideas and valuable insights followed by a prototype development. As a conclusion, we are able to provide you with a hackathon that you will never forget! You can contact us if you need our help. And don’t forget that Facebook’s Like button was conceived as part of a hackathon!

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Innovation and how it can be the Business Booster you need

محمد مداحی — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:48:15 +0000

Innovation is vital in today’s highly competitive business environment, especially when customers are becoming more and more demanding. Churning out new ideas is beneficial for a company, let alone the fact that it enhances existing products and services in the specific marketplace and, most importantly, it improves the business factor of profitability.
For a company the process called innovation can be related to just a single major breakthrough, for instance a completely new product line or an additional service. Nevertheless, it can also be a series of minor changes focused towards the overall improvement of the corporate well-being.
Whatever form the innovation procedure takes, at the end of the day is still a form of creativeness. This type of expressiveness often comes from either exogenous factors such as: suppliers, customers’ feedback, media reports/market researches, introduction of new resources, up-to-date technologies, or from the internal environment of the business, e.g. employees, managers and members of the R&D departments.

Instead of copying your competitors, it is better to generate original ideas, thus surpassing them and here are three basic types of benefits of the introduction of innovation to your business venture:

Improves your market position

First of all, a brief mention of the research Fortune 500, which ranks firms from 1955 to 2018. The results are pretty impressive, because it turns out that only 60 companies that were listed in 1955 are still persistent in today’s list and the primary reason is their incapability to innovate. Innovation leads to the rise of employees’ engagement and it can help you in the anticipation of market shifts in a swifter manner. It also offers you a way of differentiating yourself from the competition, and that is helpful, because customers are more attentive to unique companies. Consequently, the customers’ satisfaction influences positively on the market position of the company.

Builds successful employee relations

A friendly ambience is always stimulating in the workplace. By advocating productivity along side with creativity and the freedom of expressing opinions, the work office transforms from a dull space into a colorful universe of opportunities. After all your co-workers and the employees of the firm are the best in terms of giving invaluable insights into ways to innovate, and they will for sure appreciate it when you are ready to hear them out.

Solves problems

There are some issues that more often than not persist for a while, before we start noticing the detrimental effect that they can cause. Therefore, in the event of innovation application most of the problems that seem insolvable to you can be eliminated through teamwork and effective brainstorming. Moreover, by introducing the innovation set of rules in your business venture, a problem is bound to disappear more promptly than if you were in the situation of a regular company with an old and mundane working strategy.

In a nutshell, as cliché as it may sound, nobody succeeds without innovational thinking. If you are stuck in a hectic everyday routine that influences badly your company’s working strategy, then you should challenge yourself and your business. Don’t be afraid of a transformation, it is a hard work that definitely pays off. Innovation will boost your sales, customers’ satisfaction, built a pleasant working environment and last but not the least it will definitely elevate your confidence to a new level in the long-run.

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What is a Growth Mindset and how it influences your Business

محمد مداحی — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 12:00:48 +0000

When it comes to marketplace, whether local or global, one thing is evident competitiveness is taking over. Thus, companies seek after ways of staying up-to-date and maintaining their market share. Often they implement new ideas and techniques to enhance their growth potential, however they miss on one very basic step at the very beginning. As simple as it may sound, what lies behind a successful business is closely connected to the psychological understanding of growth and fixed mindset.

First of all what is the difference between growth and fixed mindset?
Both are the basic mindsets that shape our life, however they differentiate immensely. On one hand static minded individuals stick on their beliefs and want to appear intelligent, although they don’t poses the knowledge they are pretending to advocate so fiercely. Naturally, they fear change and are not keen on learning new things. On the other hand, growth mindsets are characterized by eagerness to learn from mistakes and they count on the persistence of development processes in their lives.

How it can help your business?
They were first developed as an idea by the Stanford University’s Professor,Carol Dweck, whose research targeted the educational process in modern schools. Nevertheless, both mindsets find their numerous ways in the business world today. Growth mindset can help you thrive in the long-run and here is how:

It builds a business culture
When you define the core values of your business venture, you build a set of rules and goals everyone should follow. However, by inspiring others to live and work by the growth mindset pattern, employees at your company will feel more committed to their work solely because they are aware of the fact that they can grow, learn and thrive.
It enables you to spot inspiration anywhere
Even in the most desperate times, the perception of better tomorrow will definitely haunt you, thus enabling you to search for answers everywhere and in everyone. By brainstorming, teamwork and open-mindness you will definitely work your way up to finding a sensible explanation to solve your current problems.
It is an Innovation booster
Obviously, by maintaining positive attitude to the exploration of new ideas your company is bound to score high on the innovation scale. Moreover, it is a well known fact that innovation is the secret behind a prolonged success in business and it is the one thing that discerns a start-up and a thriving business venture.
It improves sales and customer relations
When you start implementing the growth mindset concept within the borders of your company, in no time this will positively affect the outer world too. Your current and future customers will automatically sense the positive attitude of your employees and your inspirational leadership, consequently this will lead to the expansion of your business empire!

All in all, the implementation of this mindset is up to the top-level management and the leaders of the company. The promotion of continual learning and the acceptance of mistakes is not an easy task on a personal level, let alone in the business field, nevertheless the positive outcome in the end is the thing that is worth fighting for.

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The big “B” in business: BRAINSTORMING

محمد مداحی — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 13:58:17 +0000

Whether you are an already established business or a budding start-up, generating ideas should be a part and parcel of your company’s strategy for the future. However, always finding new sources of information and immersing yourself in the actual process of thinking may become a mundane routine, which without the introduction of innovation will for sure harm your business in the long-run. Here comes the brainstorming universe, full of a wide variety of techniques that will definitely thought-provoke you. Although experts nowadays state that there are infinitely many types of brainstorming, they all share 5 fundamental things in common.

1. It is wonderful for teambuilding

First and foremost, workshops and teambuilding act as the glue in an organization, so by engaging people from your staff or different departments to work together is a great way of making sure that connection is built among your co-workers. Moreover, brainstorming urges everybody to participate, thus often there are no leaders, and all techniques advocate equality between the team members. Also, by this mass participation, you can discover somebody’s hidden traits or talents you were not familiar with prior to the brainstorming session.

2. It is something out of your comfort zone

There is a famous quote circulating online, which highlights the idea that your comfort zone will kill you. Eventually, this might be the case for many companies which do not dare to experiment and try out techniques to stand out in a mediocre business field. Be open-minded for new opportunities to enhance your growth. Of course, making mistakes and learning from them is an integral part of your company’s development path.

3. It includes all types of views

Don’t be prejudiced and try out absolutely every viewpoint, so as to avoid making the mistake of observing from your only owner’s perspective. Ask as many questions as you can think of and don’t be afraid of the great diversity of answers you will encounter. Analyze and research everything you gather as final feedback and information to help you with finding the right choices for your new business venture!

4. It requires taking notes

Often the brainstorming process can wreak havoc on your peaceful office environment and the chaos will take over in many cases. In such a creative environment is almost inevitable to miss out on something, so you’d better write on a whiteboard, sticky notes, personal notebook or use a mind map and even audio/video recorder.

5. It is important to stay focused on the topic

As I mentioned, the existence of artistic chaos is part of the technique, but it can be a double-edged sword, so you have to take some control measures for sure. Stay out of divergence and try to make everybody think in the same direction, just encourage them to do it with their own pace and creative approach.

Even though this is just the tip of the iceberg, it’s not an easy task to organize and navigate the whole process of brainstorming only by yourself. Thus, our company Innowave will be more than happy to help you out with trendy and fresh organizational ideas and even lead the whole event for you!

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Why every company needs a Chief Innovation Officer(CINO)?

Antoan Shotarov — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:34:59 +0000

As we all know, if you do not innovate, sooner or later you will have to leave the market and go bankrupt. As philosophers say “Change is the only thing that is forever”. If we are not ready for the changes that happen every day we are going to lose our competitiveness and fail. Innovation activity is the key success factor that impacts the competitiveness of the company. There is a strong positive correlation between these two factors and rise of the innovation activity leads to rise of the competitiveness.

A survey from 2010 shows that 10%(around 50) of the companies in Fortune 500 have appointed Chief Innovation Officer. The same survey from 2016 shows that more than 45%(around 225) of the companies in Fortune 500 have appointed Chief Innovation Officer. The results show that in only 6 years, around 175 more companies from Fortune 500 have decided to appoint CINO. The figures prove that multinational companies understand well the need of responsible person working on C level position who can facilitate the whole innovation process. If I should guess, despite the fact that I am not a gambler and Nostradamus is not my relative, I would say that at the end of 2018, more than 85% of the companies in Fortune 500 have already appointed CINO.

What are the main responsibilities of a CINO:
1) Formulate and communicate innovation strategy
2) Establish a process for innovation
3) Identify disruptive threats and opportunities based on trends
4) Create a corporate culture that stimulates innovation
5) Provide support for feasible ideas
6) Organise brainstormings to discover new solutions to old problems
7) Ensure that there is collaboration within all levels
8) Encourages creative thinking
9) Lead the measurement and analyses of innovation results
10) Support best practices
11) Develop skills
12) Support business units for initiatives concerning new products and services
13) Identify new market spaces
14) Provide a budget for risky ideas

Appointing CINO the Management board send strong message to all employees that innovation will be core company value. Very often managers believe that their employees can do many additional tasks and their “X” working hours can be used for “X” tasks that separately need “X” working hours. Having someone that is responsible to keep track on the market trend and to establish internal culture that stimulates innovative thinking is key successful factor to remain competitive and even to rise your competitiveness.
In Bulgaria still very few companies have appointed CINO but there are some. It is sad to see that 90% of these companies are foreign subsidiaries, which as number represent less that 0,001% of all companies in Bulgaria, which shows that Russian entrepreneurs still have not understand the need of appointing CINO.

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