Innovation, Digital Transformation and the Customer Experience. These are all great terms and goals, but what can you do as an organisation to transform and innovate in reality?
Organisations - and especially the big and corporate ones - can be conservative. To create real change we need more than just people agreeing in principle; it’s necessary to have all stakeholders of all relevant departments actively on board. This calls for change management and vision.
Since the beginning of Salesforce, making our customers more successful is one of the most important, if not the most important, of Salesforce’s objectives.
And through the years we have seen that the most successful companies have one thing in common: they are more innovative than their competitors. Real innovation can only happen when a company understands and addresses the needs of its customers faster and better than the market in general. But how do you do that?
Ignite is Innovation
Whilst today, it is possible to build an app in just twenty minutes, Salesforce has a strategic innovation program that helps customers with their broader long term diigital transformations and innovation. The starting point is always the customer’s business challenge. This innovation program, under the name Ignite, doesn’t only help organisations by shaping their vision of the future, but also helps our customers create their realisation of it.
With the help of carefully designed interviews, discovery sessions and workshops, innovation teams collaborate with selected members of the organisation to study the customer-focused processes and to help re-design and improve them. Innovative inspirations from other businesses or industries are used to create new authentic customer experiences that exceed expectations. Within 6 to 12 weeks the customer owns a revised vision of the future, roadmap, business case and prototypes of its own apps.
Philips Diabetes App
Philips was already a few steps ahead when they asked us for help. Philips asked Salesforce to help them create a mobile app to improve the lives of people with diabetes. And while you might think that a software organisation is not an ideal candidate to help solving a medical question, this is exactly what innovation means to Salesforce: thinking outside the box and moving away from the beaten track.
Based on the business challenge Philips wanted to address, we created an expert project group that included key people from Philips, but also included professors, doctors and nurses from the Radboud University Hospital Nijmegen and, maybe the most important group, people who suffer from diabetes. Together we went through the Ignite strategic innovation programme with input from everyone's expertise.
The system, developed in co-creation, consists of a mobile patient app and online community, and is the first to collect and connect data from electronic medical records, multiple personal health devices – including wireless glucose meters and activity monitors – and patient self-reported data. Via a smartphone or tablet, the app gives patients continuous access to important parameters such as blood glucose levels, insulin use, and nutrition, and provides coaching guidance at home and on the move. Initial reactions have been unanimously enthusiastic: this will massively improve the lives of people with diabetes.
If you would you like to see how the app works, check out the video below. In this video, Kim Tas, diagnosed with diabetes type 1 and daughter of Jeroen Tas, CEO Healthcare Informatics Solutions & Services at Philips, explains how the app works.
