What is an Innovation Fund?

An innovation fund is a dedicated pool of financial resources that a company sets aside to invest in new, innovative projects or initiatives. It is designed to help companies stay competitive, drive growth, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

An innovation fund can be used to support various areas such as product development, technology upgrades, and process improvements. By investing in innovation, organisations can improve their efficiency, productivity, and profitability in the long run.

Top Ways to Use an Innovation Fund

Your innovation fund can be used to offset upcoming business critical projects, mobiles, devices, professional services, security solutions, technical architects to support with your journey to the cloud and so much more.

Hardware funds traditionally support your business through the Mobile device life cycle, many hardware funds are spent before they are lost, when devices do not always need replacing. Using your innovation fund, against other projects is not always obvious, a typical mobile renewal can generate tens of thousands of pounds to be used to support other focus areas on your technology road map.

Here are the common projects our customers are utilising their innovation funds to support with:

Cyber Security

Security mistakes are costly and damage reputations long term. Organisations now need to ensure they have not opened new vulnerabilities in their networks and that their people are aware of the cyber risks.

Protecting your business from cyber threats is critical in today's world. An innovation project can be focused on end point protection, multi-factor authentication (MFA), penetration testing, and cyber awareness training.

These initiatives can help to safeguard your business and protect your valuable data from cyber attacks.

The 2025 PSTN Switch Off

The Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) will be switched off in 2025, which means that businesses will need to migrate to alternative solutions. An innovation project can be focused on preparing your business for this change by implementing alternative communication solutions that use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), such as Cloud Voice.

Cloud Voice is a popular solution that enables businesses to communicate effectively and efficiently with customers and employees. An innovation project can be focused on implementing a cloud-based voice solution that provides features such as call recording, call routing, and call analytics. A project like this aims to boost productivity through improving your overall communication and collaboration capabilities.

Updating Devices

A device refresh project can help to improve your employees' productivity and satisfaction by providing them with modern laptops, desktops, and headsets. Such a project can also focus on creating hybrid or flexible work plans, allowing your people to work from anywhere, anytime.

Moving On-Premise to Cloud

Moving your servers from on-premise to the cloud can help to reduce costs, increase flexibility, and improve scalability. An innovation project can be focused on updating your servers to modern cloud solutions, allowing you to take advantage of the benefits of cloud technology.

How Chess Can Help

Supporting your business with an innovation fund is not just applicable to mobile solutions, as one of the UK’s leading independent and trusted service providers, Chess offers in-depth knowledge and expertise across your technology stack.

One of our Technical specialists can guide you through the process and offer no obligation consultancy to be your trusted chosen partner.