WWG, an Innovative SME

WHAT IS AN INNOVATIVE SME?

There are some regulatory differences between normal business organisations and an innovative SME. Different reference standards, different constituent requirements, different support measures..

Resources are easily found to explain how to access this recognition. It’s easy to find the laws that companies that decide to set their own business in the field of innovation refer to. Beyond the requirements, the criteria to detect the character of technological innovation referred to in a working group, the obvious benefits in tax terms and not, with this news we would like to pass the philosophy behind the way of working of an innovative SME.

Innovative SME? Startup? A philosophy!

Obtaining the qualification of an innovative SME does not just mean placing your company in a segment of the register of companies that deals with it. Or have a certified balance sheet or annual turnover that does not exceed 43 million euros. It means choosing to organize your work following a real philosophy. Each of us can make our business, our team and even ourselves a startup. Choosing to be an innovative SME translates into an agile development process.

Change everything to choose instead of sequential approach, assembly line, to silos/isolated teams/teams, to think exclusively of their own garden a more inclusive way of working. PMI means for WWG, confirming the idea of moving from specific to systemic, from local to global.Forget about the pyramid and welcome the concept of network. 

After all, in the digital age, can we still think of having jobs that stand on the phrase “we have always done like this”?

An innovative SME is the type of company that accepts the challenges of the market by leveraging on new ideas even before the practical implementation of the products.

SME Innovation and continuous experimentation

We are certain that Innovative of the PMI Innovative formula translates into developing that attitude necessary to transform an intention, a dream into a drawer or an idea into something concrete, measurable, alive and able to grow day after day.

For some time now many entrepreneurs, especially those who work in the field of IT have returned to talk about “being perpetually in beta”. Being BETA, like the software programs being tested and waiting for a more stable form, means renewing continuously.

Although the beta generally lasts months and are often used by not many, in fact, users have undoubted advantages. The beta programs continuously put at the center of attention the search for value for the user and sense of functions.

What would be in our profession if every day we could say: “This doesn’t really make sense?”. To be BETA and deliberately choose to stay in this phase is to give each day the opportunity to rethink, go back to the previous point learning something more to each project and continually renew. Both as individuals and as professionals.

«Beta is an existential condition. I personally lived the experience that the beta condition serves after great joys and to process great sufferings. At least it was for me. Joys because these are the moments in which we are tempted to sit on our laurels. Pain, because only by rediscovering the advantages of a beta we are able to get up and start again. Being small, but innovative, beta, every day I think is a great fortune for those who work». 

Mohamed Deramchi, CEO e Founder di WWG

Quality certifications and management philosophy

Unlike many Italian Smes, where the strategy is lowered from the top, designed by the management, hastily explained and shared in cascade to middle management first and teams, immediately after, WWG made a different choice.

To ask our teams to reach the corporate goals we are ourselves through a path of definition of the OKR that starts from meetings to arrive at a list of concrete daily actions.

Business goals

Innovative Smes (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) are companies with share capital, also set up in a cooperative form, which respect the size limits of small and medium-sized enterprises and the parameters concerning technological innovation.

As our friend Fabrizio Interlandi from Agile Italia points out in an article with the most indicative subtitle Where does the company end and you start: “There are no schools to become good managers (…) Companies are logical containers that survive in time unlike the human beings that make it up. I know it seems silly to remember but the IBM (official date of birth 1911) is obviously not currently composed of ultra centenarians still very smart, but there was a certain turnover.

That therefore remains the spirit and philosophy of the company that, as Lean teaches us, must be embodied by its leaders and workers.

By becoming an innovative SME WWG gains the opportunity to start over again, at the end of each project, after meeting a new client, when measuring what has been done and at the end of each project cycle. This loop, typical of those professionally involved in software development, improves and in a sense represents the possibility to progress professionally

The company chooses to be innovative, to renew itself in a wider and more inclusive way than it has done until now. It wants to continue to make its proposals evolve to the market and identify new ways to know new solutions, new practices constantly questioning.

To meet the real problems of the world of professions and the teams capable of solving them will be increasingly necessary to be innovative.

Being innovative points the way to three objectives:
1. Producing an advantage, on which WWG’s profit depends
2. Improving people who have a professional relationship with WWG
3. Create an advantage for the community.