Guest contributor |
When projects come together, it feels like a jolt of energy shoots through the company. But we’ve all had that feeling where the rush of early excitement gives way to the reality of corporate culture. Before you know it, you’re maintaining 19 versions of the same document in five places for three teams with two competing goals. Your responsible, accountable, consulted, informed chart looks like someone dropped last night’s spaghetti on a slide, and there’s a project manager making threatening gestures with deadlines. It’s impossible to think straight, never mind move fast.
Organisations know this is a problem. In our recent survey of 3,000 global innovation leaders and information workers, Miro discovered that only 41 per cent of leaders think their processes actively encourage faster innovation, and that number drops to less than one-third for the employees doing the work. So, it’s time to ask critical questions like ‘do teams have the right insights and collective understanding of the problems they need to solve?’, ‘are they co-creating solutions effectively?’ and ‘are they agile enough to overcome roadblocks and do they feel empowered to change direction?’
We’ve launched the Innovation Workspace to help companies cut through the tangled mess of complex workflows, lost context and siloed information that is slowing them down. It’s a single place where businesses can manage the entire lifecycle of their innovation efforts so teams can shift seamlessly from unstructured to structured work and back again, remove areas of friction, and progress from idea to outcome faster.
All of this is made possible by the Intelligent Canvas, which is an infinite playground designed for real-time visual collaboration, not just task-tracking or document storage. When teams work together on the canvas, they can take advantage of flexible formats and applications like tables, documents and presentations, so they can break down information silos, reduce the number of tools they’re using, and get back to focusing on the thing that really matters – the craft of collaboration.
Our integration with the Microsoft ecosystem of productivity tools makes this even easier. With embedded Microsoft Office 365 links, your team can simply copy and paste a link to any PowerPoint, Power BI or Word document directly into Miro. And because the data is synced, any update made in the original document will automatically be applied to Miro, too.
Instead of the data residing in one place while the work gets done in another, your teams will have access to everything in the same place with Microsoft and Miro. That means less confusion, fewer delays, and more time spent on design and prototyping.
Of course, if we’re talking about moving faster, we have to discuss artificial intelligence. We have a simple belief that AI should help teams at every stage of their work, whether it’s turning ideas into something more, collaborating effectively, or getting projects over the line. Consequently, we’ve deeply embedded AI into the canvas to automate tasks like summarising comments, grouping insights or creating diagrams and prototypes from simple text prompts.
We’re also joining forces with Microsoft to make it easier for teams to find the information they need, whether they’re working on the canvas or off it. For example, if an employee asks their team to start work on a new product launch, there would be a Miro board to gather insights and feedback from customers, but the main communication channel is Microsoft Teams. To avoid hours of scrolling through messages to find the link to the board they need, users can ask Microsoft Copilot to find it instead. All they need to do is type a query into Copilot, and it’ll provide a list of boards with a dedicated ‘open in Miro’ button. The user can then jump straight back into the canvas instead of getting lost in a maze of messages, allowing them to make faster decisions with key insights, and push the project forwards.
At Miro, we believe that innovation belongs on the canvas. But when you add Microsoft to the mix, it’s even more powerful. It’s where teams come together to discover, define and deliver ideas they’re passionate about, using the tools they love. And it’s how you hit the innovation accelerator for your enterprise.
Jeff Chow is chief product and technology officer at Miro
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