FIS has built up a new team to promote and further develop ideas: the New Business Lab. Target group are all companies wanting to test trend-setting ideas and prototypes or looking for the starting point into the agile development, project work or establishment of innovation-promoting structures.
Socialist planned economy is not a model of success as history has proven. Even with modern market economy, however, companies can manouevre themselves into a dead end with an allegedly good plan. This applies especially today when, in times of digital transformation, the market or business conditions are changing ever faster. Then it is time to constantly rethink and break new ground in an agile manner.
Since 2015, FIS has been working on how to use new approaches to promote, check and evaluate creative ideas and to make them ready for the market. “We clearly rely on advanced technologies, ways of working and methods, such as SAP Leonardo, Scrum and Design Thinking, and combine them in our New Business Lab,” explains Stephan Wagner, Senior SAP Development Consultant and head of customer development projects at FIS.
The agile, interdisciplinary innovation lab consists of Senior Business Architects as industry and process specialists, a series of Senior Developers as well as certified method experts, such as a Certified Scrum Master, a Design Thinking Professional (Hasso-Plattner-Institut D-School) and Certified Usability Engineers (Fraunhofer Institut).
Together with the customer, these professionals test the technical feasibility, economic potential and user-friendliness of the ideas provided. In short projects of a few weeks, a prototype is developed, evaluated in the proof of concept, further developed or even discarded. “The best solution is the one that is developed, tested and iteratively improved together with users,” says Benjamin Rehner, New Products Manager and method expert for Design Thinking at FIS.
The team uses a minimum viable product to develop only what is actually needed – this saves up to 40% of the development time. The minimum viable product is the smallest functional version of a product and enables initial feedback from the users. The result is software tailored to the context of use.
“Try, learn, innovate” is the guideline of the New Business Lab. Agile development in this context means that the customer can collaborate and bring in their wishes at any time since part of the process should be to constantly Learn more in the ongoing project. One thing is particularly important: get started now!
