Would you like to hear the best news ever? Nothing is perfect. Every system, process, interaction, mechanical apparatus, or digital flow, have frictions. These imperfections provide innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone looking for new business growth with an opportunity to step to the plate and come up with a solution that generates value and revenues.

To do so, you will need to have the ability to identify these frictions.The framework I describe below will enable you to unlock new opportunities and solve frictions with the power of AI and IoT.

Frictions, problmes, broken links, are all a great opportunity for innovators

To identify imperfections and frictions in behaviors, processes, and other activity flows, let's start by drawing up the complete customer journey, supply chain, or process describing the flow of events from start to finish. The imperfections, frictions, and problems we seek to solve are hiding within this flow. This approach of detailing the entire process has been around for quite a while, and it is still around because it is a robust ideation tool that delivers reliable results.

Here is an Example Of How This Tool Works: imagine an everyday process, such as getting prepared for a conference call. First, the person has to find her laptop, phone, and Bluetooth earpiece. Next, the search for an available conference room commences. Once she found an available room, she needs to connect to the office VPN and network. Following that, she will find the invite in her calendar and log on to the office phone conferencing app using a provided link. She may also need to connect her laptop to a projector or a screen in the conference room to share her slides with other participants. There will be a bit of fiddling with the air conditioner and lights, adjusting the shades, complaining about why those using the room earlier in the day left their coffee cups, and the call can commence.

If you were to think of your own experiences, or better yet, interview others about their experiences preparing for a conference call, all of the flows in the process would surface:

These are just a few exemplary frictions that following the flow of events will help us identify. The more detailed the process, the more frictions we will find. With more frictions, the more opportunities we will have to innovate and generate business value by solving these frictions and streamlining the process.

The same process works for supply chains or manufacturing processes. Describe the entire process end to end, speak with people, and capture their experiences. By doing so, you will find all of the gaps, frictions, broken links, and generally, what does not work well.

This type of approach is known as a "User-Centric" approach. We view the world and its problems through the keyhole of human experiences.

With this approach, we are not viewing the issue of connectivity to the office WIFI as a problem the laptop is experiencing. It is a problem the person experiences. A lost headset is not the fault of the Bluetooth earpiece, and we do not expect it should proactively help us locate it.

To solve frictions from a "Human Centric" approach, we will ask ourselves, "how might we solve this friction for a person" and not "how might we solve this problem for a device."

We will come up with solutions providing users with better access, streamlining processes, providing users with better access to knowledge, or enabling users to self-serve themselves.

As a result, our solutions are providing additional tools for the human user, such as an app to book rooms or a "Tile" style BLT tag to find lost items. Solutions will be found, but they will operate by relying on the active collaboration of the human user.

The beauty of IoT and AI is the new ability to make behaviors, processes and entire environments ... [+] Inteligent and Automated

Today, with the advances of IoT and AI, we are presented with the opportunity to go through the same friction exploration process described above, but, to come up with a different set of solutions to the frictions we identify. This process is not intended to replace the excellent and proven tool of finding human-related frictions, but it is a new framework, we should add to our innovation toolbox.

The combination of IoT and AI creates a new and powerful capability:

These capabilities are called"Intelligent Automation"and are the big story of the next decade of digital innovation. If previously, when looking at processes and finding frictions, we asked ourselves "how might we solve problem X forpersonY," with Intelligent Automation we can ask ourselves "how might we automate a process and make it inteligent?". By the nature of these questions, it becomes apparent that the solutions we will come up with will expand beyond the human user. We will be able to create Intelligent and Automated experiences and processes. To make processes Inteligent and Automated we need data: data that is generated by physical assets and IoT, and data which has already been digitized and exists in databases, CRM systems and other digital media.

Using Intelligent Automation, we can learn what is the best flow, predict the next steps, and take automated actions. We are moving responsibilities from the human user to machines by leveraging the power of Intelligent Automation. (more on this topic in this post )

But how do we find opportunities for driving these actions? Let's go back to our chart on the wall, which describes a customer journey, flow, or process.

We need to add two new rows below the flow we described.

In the phone conferencing example, physical assets include the phone, earpiece, office, laptop, and the Wifi router. Data can include the location of the user, her laptop, phone and bluetooth device, meeting room ocupancy and the temperature in the room.

Looking at the phone conference example, when we consider Intelligent Automation, we can come up with new types of innovative ideas based on the capabilities of IoT and AI:

The end result: process flow at the top, followed by frictions, available physical assets and data ... [+] per each step in teh process

This approach will begin to float opportunities that will expand your portfolio of ideas by adding Inteligence and Automation to processess. It will help you grow your concept portfolio from ideas that focus on streamlining the activity flow of human users to concepts that focus on how Intelligence and Automation can improve the processes.

To make sure your concepts match what technology has to offer today, read my post on how to get the most out of tech, righ now

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What Is Intelligent Automation And How It Can Help You Innovate Better - Forbes