Fueling the Flywheel of Community Innovation

In an age of continuous innovation, IT faces the inevitable ongoing pressure to launch new technology as quickly as the business demands while balancing competing expectations across stakeholders. This recurring need to maintain and upgrade existing technology while simultaneously taking advantage of the latest ingenuities has compelled enterprise tech teams across industries to take a more composable and agile approach to product development. 

For businesses that hope to keep or even set the pace, adopting a platform that empowers community-driven innovation stands out as a proven pathway to accelerate technological advancement and value for your organization. 

In this blog, we examine the benefits of ecosystem-driven innovation, centered on deeply engaging the developer community and encouraging their technological contributions, and how this positively impacts our customers in the short- and long-term. 

Spryker’s Expanded Ecosystem Approach 

By embracing the principles of ecosystem-driven development, organizations can capture the benefits of collective intelligence to innovate more effectively and efficiently. This is because co-innovation is a virtuous cycle that fosters a collaborative environment where diverse ideas converge, leading to more robust and inclusive solutions for the broader customer community. 

Collaborators help to accelerate product development, diversify problem-solving approaches, and foster a more resilient and adaptable ecosystem.

But how do companies inspire this kind of collaboration and collective intelligence?

At Spryker, our expanded ecosystem approach leverages a mix of community-building, project-based collaborations, and platform contributions.

Community-Building. CommerceQuest, Spryker’s interactive community for developers, is the perfect launchpad for genuine touchpoints, fostering engagement with others interested in commerce topics. It’s a dedicated community forum that promotes collaboration, idea-sharing, problem-solving, and networking within digital commerce and is used as a tool to inspire innovation.

Hackathons. Spryker’s hackathons invite developers and software engineers from our developer community to join multi-day events designed for solving e-commerce challenges around a specific theme. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate and learn from like-minded developers, working together to become a force of innovative change in the commerce world.

Ecosystem-led Contributions. Global contributions to the Spryker Platform are also now welcome. By inviting contributions built by customers, partners, developers, and the broader digital commerce ecosystem, Spryker is curating the platform of tomorrow with innovations from the frontlines. For global enterprises, this could mean capturing more market share by adopting new storefront capabilities ahead of competitors, faster international expansion by implementing a payment system in a new region with just a few clicks, or driving greater workflow efficiencies through feature fine-tuning. Contributors will receive rapid acknowledgment and recognition for their contributed code and documentation submissions. These contributions are broken down into two classes: Platform Contributions and Innovation Lab. 

1. Platform Contributions are ecosystem-led contributions to be built into and enhance Spryker’s core product. These include bug fixes, core improvements, and documentation updates across Spryker’s product portfolio.
2. Innovation Lab Contributions are ecosystem-led contributions, demonstrating innovative but often experimental use cases. These are built for use with, but not ordinarily maintained by Spryker and include hackathon projects, tools, and customer & partner innovation ideas across the Spryker portfolio. 

Open-Sourcing. Spryker will soon be open-sourcing Oryx Framework to democratize the ability to create dynamic front-end interfaces. Oryx Framework provides the headless flexibility and efficiency to meet the demands of both modern architecture and audiences. By open-sourcing, Spryker is unlocking a new pathway to drive technological advancement, foster creativity, and ensure innovations to Oryx are relevant to the real-world challenges businesses face. 

Each of these initiatives plays an important role in fostering a transparent, collaborative environment where the ecosystem comes together to tackle real-world challenges and create solutions that push boundaries.

Innovating Tomorrow, Together

Co-innovation is a transformative journey toward sustainable technological advancement. The benefits of it can empower companies to confront inherent budget and timeline challenges—as well as the constant pressure to upgrade technology.

By cultivating an environment where community members are motivated to contribute and take ownership, Spryker is unleashing innovation that is not only continuous but also inclusive. 

That’s why Spryker is beyond excited to reinvigorate our collaborative processes, charting new horizons hand-in-hand with our esteemed developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to our platform, product, or tooling, we encourage you to learn more here.