Innovating like we mean it
09 Apr 2024
6 mins
So much of today’s tech AI rhetoric is focused on urgency and speed to market - and lacks purposeful innovation. The hype-cycle surrounding new technologies is accelerating as start-ups and solutions continue to emerge. This can lead organizations to adopt new technologies in an uncoordinated way, in many cases simply because they want to be seen as a modern, progressive organization that’s active in these new spaces.
Our recent Genuine Intelligence report, focused on the future of human and machine collaboration, discusses the concept of purposeful innovation in more detail, offering insights into how you can ensure your innovation lifecycle has clear objective and outcome. At RWS, we live and breathe this philosophy. We have a long history of executing the S-curve pattern of innovation, across decades, from developing incipient tools and dictionaries, through translation memories, machine translation and now with today’s GenAI revolution we're finding new and exciting ways to help clients.
Anchoring our intentional innovation in the evolution of the Trados product line, we are taking actions to go past the allure of novelty, rolling up our sleeves to make a difference in the translation game, one meaningful change at a time. This deliberate approach to change is predicated on a clear understanding of user needs and the market landscape, guiding RWS's commitment to purposeful change.
Actions matter more than words so let me raise the veil on what happens behind the scenes here in our Research and Development group.
In the Trados product line, we build software for hundreds of enterprises, thousands of medium companies and hundreds of thousands of everyday users. This requires significant coordination of dozens of teams within a process audited and certified in accordance with many high-compliance standards. And, despite our significant investment, there is always a hard choice of where we get to focus our efforts. Sometimes it feels like a Sisyphus journey.
It would be easy (some may say natural) to get caught up in this methodical pace and consider innovation as just a “business-as-usual” concern. But as an industry leader we need to remain at the forefront of innovation – so how can one maintain nimbleness and still perform at scale?
Our Trados teams are shaped to recognize and foster innovation in all stages of the product lifecycle. Whether one looks at this as a Genesis to Mature product and then to Commodity or Utility transformation, or as a dual operating system, we act to enable and support innovation at each such stage.
Purposeful innovation
One action, among many, is to break the pace and make room for an – annual works best for us – Innovation Event in which all teams step out of process and form ad-hoc alliances to solve previously unsolved business or technical challenges.
What happens then is like magic: we see trailblazers who thrive on rare, poorly understood ideas and are willing to experiment and tolerate failure.
We also see people who take a rudimentary idea, mature it into a product, appreciate constant enhancements, market analysis, feedback and are attuned to customer needs.
And we also see groups which like to optimize and build operational efficiency, driven my metrics and analytics. They deal with common, well-defined tasks, essential for business operations, and they work at high volumes.
All those teams innovate. If we look at the most recent event, we will see applied innovation from all those approaches.
Of course, we have seen Generative AI, but not in your usual scenarios. We have seen methods to improve translation engineering tasks, natural language interactions instead of specialized user interfaces and multi-modal multimedia localization.
Equally important, innovations to reduce a few seconds from each processing step, which matters when we are making millions of steps a day. Innovations to improve observability both at technical but also at information architecture level.
Or innovations to enable businesses tap into their localization resources in ways they never thought before or for staff who did not consider they need such until now.
A few weeks after the event, we can observe tangible benefits obtained from these innovations. Here are just a few examples:
- Faster answers to our customer queries. Our Trados and wider RWS team has hundreds of people interacting with customers. On the other hand, our product teams deliver new functionality every week (if not every day). We found and are applying a way to empower our colleagues to find answers much better from now on.
- Data is gold. Or sand. Or a liability. Access to the tremendous amount of data gathered during the translation process can help stakeholders and managers shape their business processes and achieve higher goals. But access to it is usually constrained by limited reports or the need for specialist knowledge. We are applying a way to enable anyone to obtain the data insights they need.
- Information at your fingertips. Multiple innovations were about making it easier for our users to understand localization aspects, either technical or business in nature. Not just by displaying them but by refining the user experience in more than just that, which led to faster decision making. Accessibility is a big part of helping our users achieve more and we have seen tangible improvements from vision impaired people as we aim to be the best product of our industry also in that regard.
Besides all of that, another intangible effect was the tremendous energy this event generated. It was not limited to only the weeks in which it took place, but we can feel it still beating across the organization.
“We’re intentional about making space to push the boundaries of technology and innovations to bring the best to our customers and the industry. Witnessing our team tackle challenging problems within tight deadlines and then successfully scaling the results reinforces the leadership position we take pride in," commented Mark Lawyer, General Manager Linguistic AI at RWS.
As with last year’s event, many of this year’s 40 demonstrated innovations will find their way into the hands of our users. We know they will appreciate it as everything was deeply grounded in how we understand the market and not just chasing the latest buzzwords.
At RWS, having such a diverse set of teams, we have the unique ability to tap between different areas of expertise, such as AI specialists working closely with language experts, to drive innovation that is both technologically advanced and deeply attuned to the practical needs of users.
We are happy to see this innovation sandbox taking shape year after year while also infusing the business-as-usual innovation actions. Ideas certainly have an environment where they can be tested and grown, through dedicated time, with great development autonomy and incentives for success.
Click here if you'd like to read our Genuine Intelligence report and learn how to harness the best of humans and AI in your innovations.
Rares Vasilescu
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