It’s outsmarting, not outsourcing

Let’s face it. We live and work in a world where the technology we use to make our lives “easier” changes faster than we can keep up with as consumers. Nothing easy about that.  Now, imagine being the innovator creating these inventions, struggling to be agile and fluid enough in their approach to invention so they can be competitive, without putting their eggs in the wrong tech basket or screwing up the creation of an innovation because they bit off something they never chewed before.

Knowing where to spend your effort and resources, and where you can collaborate through open innovation with trusted partners to bring your ideas to life quickly, often makes the difference in your success. It’s outsmarting through outsourcing.

To be able to stay ahead of your competition, you need a solid understanding of the task at hand, the tasks to come. You need to know which will get the appropriate attention and often finite resources available to you.  Far too often firms keep the execution of innovation in-house as a means to protect and control, when the most successful firms have realized that open innovation achieved through strategic outsourcing with partners they trust fosters more long term success.

Insight into the developing landscape in which your idea will thrive requires an ability to see things that have not happened… yet.  Travis Kalanick’s innovation with Uber did more than make getting somewhere by car easier and immediate, he saw the need for a service that leveraged the downtime of drivers in an emerging and more efficient freelance economy where drivers no longer wanted to be beholden to large fleets and consumers wanted a premium experience, now. They did not know they wanted their booking outsourced until they had it on their dashboard—that is the disruption. Now the consumer behavior of “want it now” is being successfully applied to house calls by doctors through Uber-like apps like Pager in NYC and Heal in LA and San Francisco. Blowing away the national average wait time to get a doctor’s appointment from 20 days to a few hours. Thats sick! Pun intended.

For firms like Zemoga, which has been helping companies turn the battleship (and the dingy) in the bathtub, we have learned that when client partners complement their skills and expertise with ours through solid planning and a lot of trust,  the result can be game changing, like Uber. And to have a motivated international group of world class designers and developers in their quiver to keep them on target, gives our client partners a new refreshed sense of courage to take chances. To shoot for the apple so to speak. It’s often because they know we have their backs on the design and technology skills they were less confident about having in-house.

We have the years of collaborative experience to integrate with our client’s teams and deliver flawlessly. In the case of GulfStream, a leading manufacturer of private jets, they knew what they knew, and that was building jets. They were willing to tap into our design and development talents in understanding and creating engaging mobile digital experiences to collaboratively create a never before seen way to configure and sell their jets. At often $100 million a pop for some of the worlds most lauded aircraft, the solution needed to be as groundbreaking and beautiful as the product. The result was an innovation that leveraged all our combined talents for an end result on iPad called Design Book. This solution continues to have a direct effect on not only the brand perception, but more importantly, the bottom line: they sell more jets.

Gulfstream chose to outsmart the competition by engaging a firm that knew emerging technologies and consumer behaviors they were willing to admit they did not. That realization is a giant step to allowing your firm to get your idea to market better, faster and often less expensive across many of the line items we measure as a “cost”. Outsmarting through outsourcing just makes better sense.

For more information on how Zemoga can help your firm take advantage of strategic outsourcing and do great things, contact DJ Edgerton at or visit to see some samples of our work for clients.

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