What is an Innovation Agency?

Businesses often do not have capacity to set up their own innovation teams or departments, or research technologies that might benefit them. There are many factors that impede even modern companies on this path: lack of resources, lack of budget, resistance to change, the need for siloing, tendency to maintain status quo.

Yet survival in the fast-paced world of technology strongly depends on the ability to reinvent the business, the processes and embrace technological progress. Before the middle of 20th century all growth was linear. You can spend your entire lifetime going from point A to B to C et cetera. Nowadays everything is exponential. Businesses that do not reinvent themselves quickly become threatened by fast-moving technology-savvy competitors.

But how to cope with this insane technological struggle without capacity to reinvent your business?

That's where an innovation agency comes in. An innovation agency is an external innovation team that makes the luxury of having someone incubate, develop and showcase your ideas for the future affordable. An innovation agency is not an outsourcing company. An outsourcing company focuses on implementation: they execute on the specifications provided by the client. They cannot generate specifications on their own, because the client owns the deliverables.

In contrast, an innovation agency helps customers to shape the products, sometimes even starting from a plain idea. An innovation agency does not simply create software, but also makes it harmonize with the business of the customer. An idea might not be easily expressable in code. Worse, it is usualy unclear what has to be developed and what design choices to make. Before a feasible implementation plan can be layed down, one needs to conduct a research that supports feasibility of the idea and sheds the light on relevant design choices.

The other services that an innovation agency delivers is prototyping. A product design is vague without a prototype. Before a product is built out of an idea its pros and cons are not visible and difficult to predict. The implementation might be constrained or even impossible at the current technological level. A stakeholder trying to embark on a journey to build a product out of an idea without a prototype is taking enormous and unpredictable risks.

A prototype is a product that implements just enough features to provide feedback, satisfy early customers or make an investment pitch possible. By means of a prototype it is possible to justify a cost sheet for further development. Successful work on a prototype requires special skill that trades efforts for robustness and added value of features.

That's why an innovation agency is not an outsourcing company: an innovation agency simply requires different skills to deliver value. Where an outsourcing company employs a team of niche professionals with the focus on the pace and the quality of delivery, an innovation agency employs a multidisciplinary team of all-rounders with broad set of skills that is able to quickly analyse the concepts and try out various implementation directions.

Coldrift Technologies is an innovation agency and a technology consultancy company that offers a range of innovative services to help you reinvent your business. It simply starts with a coffee: during a conversation we will discuss how we can add value to your business or turn your idea into reality. Our onboarding process is really easy and non-binding: before we go into the woods you will always be able to walk away.

We are always ready to try new things and reinvent what's around us. This is what makes Coldrift Technologies such great innovation partner.