Equiniti has been committed to bolstering effective, meaningful collaboration between its business and its clients this year, and it has fully harnessed the potential of innovation to do so. For Di Penly, Senior Manager of Innovation at Equiniti’s Registration Services, such work has to start from within.
People generally think that innovation is something which just happens or that someone has that ‘light bulb’ moment, but really it’s as much about the small incremental innovations and creating the right culture and environment.
In fact, the research that Di and her team have done has shown that within such a culture and environment innovation isn’t just possible; it’s fully repeatable. Earlier this year, then, Equiniti partnered with Brighton University and CENTRIM – part of the Brighton Business School and one of the world’s top 10 innovation research groups – to build its innovation agenda.
A series of workshops and training sessions inspired the business to develop its own innovation campaigns to better understand the needs of its clients. Using Ignite, a new tool which enables online collaboration across different areas of businesses, two initial campaigns were run. The first was centred upon improving the Selector tool, while the other dealt with the Model Code, an area of increasing focus for all PLCs.
“Clients across businesses were able to log onto the system when they wanted, where they wanted, to contribute and to see what others were contributing,” says Di. “When people are in different parts of businesses and in different teams it can be difficult to get them together, but with ‘Ignite’ they are able to collectively submit their own ideas in response to specific problems and comment on other ideas.”
The tool has given Equiniti a good mechanism so that people can proactively engage in the practice of innovation and helped us to effectively create the right environment and culture in order for ideas to flourish.
But it also needs analysis. Subsequent to the running of the two campaigns, internal experts at Equiniti went through every contribution one-by-one and grouped them into categories. For example, in the case of the Selector tool campaign many comments were made in relation to a client dashboard; the ideas were grouped into areas of functionality and then assessed to work out whether they could be taken forward.
“We’re now at the stage whereby we’re amalgamating all of the information received from the campaigns so that we can start building business cases for investment,” says Di. She knows the importance of this to the business’s clients; after all, the campaigns have enabled Equiniti to get closer to its clients and have them fully engage with the development of the products and service which they utilise.
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