Innovation is critical to establishing new solutions and is something that every business handles. It can come in many different forms and styles, but regardless of the methods you use, innovation cannot be ignored. However, when working in a digital workspace, creating lasting innovative solutions is much more difficult than usual. Instead of circumventing the innovation process, you can use an online whiteboard to create new innovative solutions during a litany of different scenarios.
In this article, we will talk about the challenges that come with innovating virtually and how online whiteboards can help bridge the gap between online struggles and creating digitally permanent solutions.
How online whiteboards create impactful innovation
Many of the problems that arise with digital workplace innovation are caused by the lack of a shared visual space for teams. This is an inherent element to in-person collaboration, as most rooms have a whiteboard or sketchpad that can easily be utilized. Online workspaces don’t have this, so if your innovation capabilities seem to be lacking it’s probably because of the absence of this shared space.
Online whiteboards provide the perfect alternative to an in-person collaboration experience and create a space where creativity and innovation are enabled to succeed.
By bringing teams together in a visually shared space everyone has a much easier time understanding each other and visualizing their contributions. This team alignment is key in stimulating innovation, allowing teams to operate off the same set of assumptions. This directs contributions and collaboration towards the goals you’re trying to meet.
Innovation doesn’t only result from alignment. It’s just as important to engage in free thinking to develop innovative solutions. Online whiteboards are equally as able to create innovative branches of thought to stimulate free thinking and creativity as they are able to promote alignment and organization. Both elements are critical to maximizing your ability to locate and execute on possible sources of innovation.
One of the most difficult aspects of traditional innovation is that the results and ideas aren’t inherently made permanent. You may experience a brilliant spark of innovation and ideation and lose it just a minute later, or you can commit to incorporating new changes into your business plan and soon after forget the important steps. It is this loss of knowledge that online whiteboards are able to mitigate in their entirety.
When using online whiteboards there will never be any lost knowledge. Online whiteboards create digital permanence for all of your ideas and innovations, enabling lasting impacts for your ideas. Because you have a physical point of contact that anybody can refer back to, you can rest easy knowing that your innovative spark will keep burning in your saved online board.
Because using online whiteboards offers so much important innovative boosts, it can fully engage teams working online workspaces to achieve their maximum innovative potential. Below are some specific difficulties resulting from online innovation and some applications that are perfect for online whiteboards.
Innovation Difficulties
Innovation is never straightforward, especially trying to create it when working online. There is a unique set of struggles that may arise when innovating online, and we will break down a couple of those difficulties and how online whiteboards can help solve them.
Indecision
Indecision in the workplace can hinder your team’s momentum and efficiency during collaboration, two things that are important to creating innovative solutions. When working virtually and not collaborating in person with your teammates it can be hard to be decisive. Communication is more difficult and it’s harder to gauge what people are thinking and how they want to move forward. The virtual setting makes it even easier to be indecisive because you aren’t physically present with people, something that helps push decisions and actions.
Many of the difficulties that arise from indecision are simply the result of the communication block that can occur when working online. Online whiteboards are key to bridging this communication gap and therefore the struggles of indecision. By providing a shared visual space, people are able to see, edit, and use other contributions to inform their thoughts and future work. Because of the shared nature of online whiteboards, indecision declines when brainstorming innovative solutions.
No shared collaborative space
One of the most important parts of innovation is being able to collaborate with your team. Especially when working in brainstorming scenarios, working with other people helps push everyone to think of unique solutions and creatively work towards your end goals.
Especially when operating in a digital workspace, there is no inherently shared space that exists like there is when working in person. Without this, it’s much harder for people to come together and ideate as a team. Working online then simulates everyone brainstorming ideas alongside each other rather than with each other. Using an online whiteboard is the key tool to bridge this gap in collaboration, and enables teams to work with each other to find innovative solutions.
Lack of follow-through
One of the most important parts of innovating is following through on your ideas. The end goal of innovation, realistically, is being able to brainstorm a feasible solution that you can implement into the project that you’re working on.
This implementation and follow-through can be more difficult than ever when working in an online workspace due to the lack of shared organization. Traditionally, it’s quite easy to quickly assign tasks and structure your next steps in person, but when you lack that inherent shared space it takes extra thought to plan where to go next and the actual tasks that are required to get there.
Online whiteboards are a fitting solution to the lack of follow-through experienced in a virtual workspace. Having a permanent record of what you decide, and the strategy to implement it is a perfect reference point to complete the project moving forward. You will always be able to look back on the ideas, their influence, and how to implement them to be confident in your ability to follow through.
Applications of Online Whiteboard Innovation
Virtual Workshops
Virtual workshops are some of the most impacted events when working online, and using a shared visual space is an absolute necessity if you are to achieve successful results.
One of the most important aspects of virtual workshops or virtual seminars is the takeaways you receive. Whether you are working towards achieving a new goal in your everyday life, moving towards a more connected workspace, or changing the way you operate as a team, any takeaways are important to remember and implement into your workspace.
One of the biggest complaints of virtual workshops is that they provide an instant spark, a moment of brilliance, and then after time, the important takeaways that seemed so brilliant are lost or forgotten.
Online whiteboards fix this issue entirely by providing a place for your takeaways to live in digital permanence. Because of this, the innovative takeaways of every virtual workshop can exist and integrate directly into your work, solving the common issue of them getting easily lost or forgotten.
This ability to integrate the takeaways of virtual workshops makes them much more effective when incorporating online whiteboards. You can read more about virtual workshops on Fresco.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a key property of innovation, and one of the most principle exercises that engages creativity. Because of its flexibility and innovative capability, it is central to most innovation workshops.
One of the most impactful elements of brainstorming is being able to work with the contributions of other people and collaborate based on their ideas. When you put multiple minds together, you can create ideas and solutions beyond what you can access as an individual.
Given that working together is critical for brainstorming, it only follows that using a shared space to collaborate will stimulate your ability to produce innovative results, both online and in person. Using online whiteboards allows teams to add a key visual interface to their brainstorming and easily organize their approach, allowing for greater results and more streamlined innovation.
Conclusion
Innovation is a critical part of growth for any business, and whether you’re working online or in — person, integrating an online whiteboard helps solve a lot of the difficulties that are inherent to the innovative process. Thanks to their organization, freedom, and ability to hold information in digital permanence, they are the perfect tool to create impactful innovation.
