Your Business — An Innovation Machine
As businesses grow, there is need for them to seize opportunities to expand and grow even more. These opportunities will necessitate businesses being innovative in either the products or services they create or how they do business with respect to their processes and how they interact with the market.
But you can also go further by making your business an innovation machine, constantly churning out new ideas for products, services, processes and ways of doing business rather than making it a one-off, chance thing.
How do you achieve this? You build and foster a culture of creativity and innovation within the company.
To achieve this, you can use the following tips:
· Define your innovation. Language is an important part of culture, and if you desire to build a culture of innovation, it is necessary that everyone within the business speaks the same language. This means that there is a common understanding of what innovation is, especially in the context of your business.
· Be a learning organization. Innovation comes from knowledge: knowledge of your business, of your market and customers, of your competitors, of trends within your industry. It also helps to study other industries as you could get ideas from there, like cross-pollination.
· Listen. Listen to your customers, to your staff, to your competitors, to the news, to everything. Ideas can come all these places and even more.
· Embrace risk. You cannot have a culture of innovation where there is risk of failure. You need to encourage your team and yourself to try, even if it will fail. From these trials comes knowledge that can be put to use in better ways, of what works and what doesn’t work. Make it acceptable and routine to talk about ideas and projects that failed. Allow brainstorming sessions and encourage to bring forth even the craziest of ideas.
· Flatten your organization. Ideas are not the sole preserve of the boss — the best ideas could come from even the cleaner or intern. To achieve this, you need to remove hierarchical thinking within your organization, where one person or a group of persons at the top think up the ideas and the rest simply follow instructions.
· Execute fast. The best ideas are nothing without proper execution. When you decide on an idea to work on, move fast on it, not necessarily rushing the project but being decisive about it. You can build prototypes or execute on a small scale to test before scaling up. But one thing for sure — don’t tarry too long on an idea.
· Disrupt yourself if you have to. Don’t be afraid of innovating your product or service even if it will replace an existing and extremely popular and profitable one. A big mistake many companies make is that they get complacent with their best-selling products that they do not see where they could have improved on it, leaving the job to competitors. Two good examples come to mind: Sony missed out on creating the winning mp3 player by improving on its Walkman player and left it to Apple iPod; while Blackberry did not see where its once-popular smartphones were lagging behind, until, again, Apple iPhone and Android systems took over the scene completely.
The more you do these things, the better you get at them until it becomes a part of your DNA, and the results will always pay off.
