Imagine a world where innovation is magically embedded in all your favorite apps with the click of a button, and seamlessly flows through everyday work across the enterprise.

Imagine a world where your team can innovate without ever having to leave the tools they love or the tools your organization uses on a day-to-day basis.

Imagine a world where innovation can happen anywhere and anytime, or better yet, where innovation and cross-functional collaboration skyrocket into the stratosphere through task automation and automatic information discovery.

Gee whiz, I sure wish I lived in a world like that. Oh wait, I do. *Queue celebration 🎉*

Innovation app integrations are all the rage these days, and rightfully so: technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate, the global datasphere is multiplying to levels our brains can’t even begin to comprehend, and automation is permeating every aspect of work. So to make sense of the madness, we need to connect everything to everything, everyone to everyone, and everything to everyone. And we need to streamline it all. And automate it too. Can you feel the pressure mounting yet? I sure do.

“Integrations are no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity” – The guy who wrote this article

OK, melodrama aside, the reality is integrations are no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity (that’s right, I quoted myself). Organizations and individuals alike are increasingly looking for ways to streamline mundane and routine tasks, so they can use that extra brainpower and focus it on more important matters at hand, like coming up with creative ways to improve or innovate your company’s current offerings. Better yet, they can leverage that extra energy and time to collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, and together conjure up breakthrough ideas by scouting emerging tech or trends that extend your firm’s market value. Or maybe, just maybe, they can even use those resources to identify risks, or plan scenario-based activities so your organization can better prepare for the next crisis, whatever and whenever that may be.

As an added bonus, teams don’t even have to divert resources to adopting or adapting to new platforms; that’s the magic of integrations. Innovation becomes instantly embedded not only into the tools your team uses, but also into the work they do everyday. In other words, they can seamlessly and effortlessly innovate without ever having to exit their current applications, whether it’s Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, or even Slack, to name a few.

So let’s say Bob is having a conversation with Sally on Slack about something Sally read in the news recently that got her attention, like this wacky new tech or trend that their company can seriously leverage to edge the competition. A simple conversation, which may or may not have to do with work, can suddenly spark a breakthrough business solution. So from within Slack, Sally decides to submit an idea to a challenge as part of a company wide innovation campaign. Now multiply these conversations times the number of interactions between teams or individual employees throughout your organization. And don’t stop there. Think of the external conversations employees can have or are having with external stakeholders, like customers, strategic partners, suppliers, researchers, R&D problem solvers, etc. The possibilities for future-proofing your organization become endless.

Now let’s talk about ideas, or more specifically, coming up with ideas. On the surface it sounds like an ideal concept: two employees having a conversation and BOOM, one of them comes up with a solid solution that turns a creative project into a winning business outcome. But there’s more to it than meets the eye: as previously mentioned, the collective sum of the world’s data is growing to levels we can’t even begin to grasp. According to IDC’s Data Age 2025: The Digitization of the World, the global datasphere is expected to explode from 33 Zettabytes in 2018 to 175 Zettabytes in 2025 (that’s 175,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes for you numerophiles out there). To say that’s a lot of information is a serious understatement.

Even with all the brainpower you may have at your disposal, there’s no way in a million Zettabytes you can have humans comb through and sort all this information. But! what you can have is AI power do the heavy lifting by automatically curating and fetching articles and other relevant sources based on filters specified by humans. The result? Put simply, this means your team can leverage a constant stream of auto-curated content for endless inspiration and ideas to collaborate and build on. To put things into more tangible perspective, remember when the COVID-19 pandemic started? You kept seeing these articles about how company X predicted it, or how company Y used AI to anticipate a global catastrophe? Well, that’s the power of AI, data, collaboration, and human ingenuity, all of which can now be combined with a simple click of a button.

Check out our innovation app integrations directory to learn more, or schedule a consultation with one of our experts to see our innovation app integrations in action!