What is digital innovation?
What comes to mind when you think of digital innovation? Techniques, work methods, technologies, and products—digital innovation is everywhere. It is a process where you improve your operations using digital tools and techniques. In the cultural sector, digital innovation is a way to continue engaging with existing and new audiences, utilizing digital developments. For example:
- Adding a digital element to your physical product, such as a performance, exhibition, collection, or choreography. Think of digital audience guidance, hybrid performances, or additional online offerings.
- Making your physical product more accessible through digital means, such as online ticket sales, additional explanations on your website, and online marketing.
- Optimizing your work processes with digital applications, such as designing an exhibition setup in a digital model of your physical space, collaborating remotely with colleagues and external parties, or gaining insight into your target audience using a digital CRM system (CRM stands for customer relationship management).
Digital innovation creates a future-proof organization
Why focus on digital innovation? Digital innovation is necessary to stay ahead of or adapt to the challenges of a changing world. It encourages you to keep innovating while putting your audience at the center. After all, their expectations and desires evolve along with the world around them. By continuously paying attention to this, you create an organization that has value both now and in the future.
Innovative work is the key
Digital innovation and digital transformation benefit from innovative work. This ensures that you continuously identify opportunities, adopt new methods, and, above all, experiment. Future-proofing depends on agility. Innovative work teaches you how to embrace and apply this within your current organizational structure.
Many organizations cling to methods that no longer work. Do you want to approach things differently? Innovative work is staying agile in a changing world.
Digital skills: the what and why
As our society becomes increasingly digital, digital skills are essential for innovation. To be future-proof and innovative as an organization, it is important that your employees, colleagues, and teams are trained in the right skills. Such as SEO and data analysis, customer journeys, and digital thinking. But also (digital) storytelling, GDPR, and online user behavior. A variety of skills that, together, make you stronger in the digital transformation.
Digital transformation and innovation are human work. Therefore, invest in skills.
Which skills you specifically need in the digital transformation depends on the strategy you choose. To provide an integrated approach, it is important to have as many diverse skills in-house as possible. For example, try working with the DEN Focus Model and consider which skills are useful in each quadrant. For processes, you can think of ICT skills to optimally utilize collection management systems or CRM data. For audience engagement, insights into storytelling techniques and the audience of the future are more important. Thus, there are specific skills for each quadrant that are most effective when shared and utilized across the organization.
How to develop a strategy for digital innovation
Digital skills provide a foothold in a changing world. For everything digital, it is constantly evolving. How the audience interacts with certain content can change from day to day. What works today might fail tomorrow, and data is continuously collected. Because everything is increasingly visible in the short term or even in real-time, it is tempting to jump from one thing to another. However, this causes you to lose sight of the long-term goals.
In addition to digital skills, strategic insight is therefore important. How do you deal with sudden changes in data? When do you stick with an approach a bit longer, and when is it time for a radically different approach? You can create these frameworks within your organization. What helps with this are tools for iterative and agile working. This ensures that you can adjust on a project basis without losing sight of the strategic end goal. Our Innovative Work workshop provides you with these tools.
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