Did you expect, when starting your career path in technical communication that you would need to be a ‘polymath’ and become adept in a wide range of supporting roles? Well, if you didn’t, it’s time to get with the programme and be part of the hyper-innovation movement to avoid being overwhelmed by AI and underwhelmed by losing out.
For businesses, hyper-innovating means:
- Embracing change and innovation
- Prioritising learning and training
- Developing digital fluency across all departments
- Constantly evolving
- Adopting new tools for collaboration and teamwork
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that innovation may be called upon from the unexpected as well as the obvious. A study by Citrix Systems found that investment in new technology and flexible working systems in the COVID-19 turbulence generated a $678 billion boost in worldwide industry revenues. It was the result of 49% of businesses investing more in innovation and 89% enabling flexible and rapidly changed workplace practises.
The hybrid working model is now a core feature of hyper-innovation and is now couched in the term ‘collaboration’ when it comes to teams of employees, freelancers, and contractors. Read the full article on forbes.com here.
The new Digital Era is characterised by hyper-innovation, hyper-adoption, and hyper-collaboration… sharing is the crucible of innovation and adoption at the centre of digital sharing is digital communication. Read more here.
As Bernard Marr, author of Future Skills and several other future-tech books, put it on raconteur.net, ‘The digital transformation is an all-encompassing endeavour’. New AI-driven technologies will need to be integrated into legacy operating systems, ahead of totally replacing them, and the culture, mindset, worker skills, and leadership mentality will each need syncing to the evolving digital landscape. This paradigm shift requires embracing digital technologies as integral components of business strategy.
For Baby Boomers, Gen Xs, and older Millennials who weren’t born as ‘digital natives’, a new and wider language of digital fluency is upon us, requiring upskilling – or perhaps ‘side-skilling’ to widen competencies rather than deepening one key component.
If understanding how to use a technology was once sufficient, exploiting its versatility, appreciating the ethical implications and its scope for cyber-abuse, then incorporating the language for UX and instructional purposes will be part of the hyper-innovation that businesses face. This means prioritising continuous innovation to harness disruptive innovation to thrive.
If training corporate programmes were once designed and segregated by department or sector, and part of a rigid calendar schedule of courses, the new corporate culture will demand continuous learning and adaptability across the whole employee spectrum. Online training modules, remote learning, and outsourced programmes will be increasingly used to attain this level of innovation.
Attaining a ‘hyper-innovation status’ is no given — many corporates will fail to achieve the holistic and multi-level adaptation required to remain competitive. Similarly, many employees and contractors will fail to assimilate a sufficiently wide skills and knowledge base to remain marketable.
Firehead anticipated this paradigm shift and we’re continually rolling out training courses for motivated and forward-thinking digital and technical communicators who want to speak the language of ‘hyper-innovation’. Can you afford not to?
