Here is an all-too-common scenario: you go to an industry event or trade show, try on a Gear VR or HTC Vive, and are absolutely blown away by the VR experience shown to you. The lightbulb goes off in your head… you’ll be the VR champion at your company! But how do you get management buy-in and funding for your VR projects?

Even with daily headlines about the power of Virtual Reality, employees are still saddled with occasional corporate resistance to VR adoption. This happens with any new and exciting technology. New funding has to be allocated to the project, or shifted from an existing area to VR.

Below, we’ll walk through some common strategies to garnering management approval and funding for your VR projects.

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Show them the numbers

VR is far from niche. Google announced in February that it had shipped over 10 million low-cost Cardboards, with over 160 million (!) downloads of Cardboard apps from its Google Play Store, as of that date. Samsung is expected to have over 10 million Gear VRs in use by the end of 2017. And with WebVR and virtually every smartphone being VR-capable, the addressable market for your VR application is huge.

Even for internal use apps though, numbers are important. For instance, one of the most popular corporate use cases for InstaVR is VR for Training. There is a tangible ROI for incorporating VR into your training curriculum. You can reduce cost of travel for employees, cost of travel for trainers, and decrease the amount of time it takes to onboard new employees. The more you can quantify these savings, the easier is to get budget allocated for your project.

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Show them the competitors

Even though your organization might not currently be using VR, there’s a good chance your tech-forward competitors are. Having traveled to many trade shows, across a range of industries, I can safely say that the number of VR headsets I have seen on exhibition floors has increased dramatically. So not only is the question “Should my company be using VR?”, but “How can I use VR smarter than my competition?”.

Toyota, for instance, uses InstaVR-generated 360 video tours with the HTC Vive to show off their campus to potential employees at job fairs. Millennials crave memorable experiences. If you want to stand out a job fair, and garner more foot traffic, it pays off to invest in an HTC Vive, InstaVR, etc. If you’re not, you’re losing eyeballs to the Toyotas of the world.

Or take Hello Kitty. Their Puroland theme park in Japan incorporated InstaVR into their marketing mix, making a series of 360 video tours for Gear VR to show to overseas travel agencies. VR helps their marketing team at large travel exhibitions transcend language. The visceral, immersive experience of the Hello Kitty character walking you through the park is joyful and memorable. If you’re at a similar travel exhibition, handing out flyers or showing a 2D YouTube video, you’re not going to be able to compete with the Hello Kitty marketing team.

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Show them a Proof of Concept app

For some managers, the best way to get approval is to actually go out and build a Proof of Concept version. For under $1,000 USD, you can a purchase an entry-level 360 camera and an InstaVR Pro subscription. The quality of your PoC app will not be ideal with a lower end camera, but at least you’ll have something real and tangible to show on iOS, Android, Google Cardboard, or any number of low cost (~$25 – $100) iOS or Android compatible headsets.

Then once you have that initial Proof of Concept, you can generate some excitement for greater company investment. But the lower barrier to entry for creating your first VR app makes in accessible for most companies. With InstaVR, you don’t have to outsource a single step in the VR app creation process. Anyone, in any department — IT, HR, Art, Marketing, Sales, Operations — can have a distribute-ready Proof of Concept in days.

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Conclusion

Any disruptive technology is initially met with funding and buy-in challenges. Virtual Reality has been around for a long time, but only now, with the current wave of hardware and software companies, is VR becoming a “need to have” within companies.

To accelerate adoption, we strongly suggest the aforementioned three steps: 1. Show your company the numbers — for some use cases, the ROI is very easy to prove. 2. Show your company the competition — there is a first mover advantage, and if your competition is already incorporating VR into their workflow, you’re going to have to play catch-up with a tool like InstaVR, that accelerates the app creation process. 3. Create a Proof of Concept app – for under $1,000, you can have a working Virtual Reality application to pitch to management to get a meaningful investment in the technology.

If you have any questions on InstaVR, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Head of Sales, Andrew Woodberry, andrew at instavr.co or +1 925-708-3928.