5 Tips To Innovate Better In Your Business

It’s the radical innovations that we all hear about. The game changers that disrupt. Rarely do the tiny, incremental innovative advances of small business get much attention. Yet these are the type that offer you the biggest opportunity to drive better results in your business.

Big organisations like Adobe, Linkedin, Ericcson, Whirlpool, 3M and Google all support employee innovation. They have programs that allow any employee to pitch and develop a new idea. In fact by 2009, half of all Google’s products had their origins from the 20% program which allows their employees to spend 20% of their time working on new and innovative ideas.

But innovation isn’t just for big business. In fact, small businesses and start-ups, free from bureaucratic constraints, compelled by a desire to improve things or driven by passion often do it better, disrupting markets in the process. Just look at what Uber has done to the taxi industry in NYC, where taxi licence prices are plummeting as ride sharing takes off or Xero to bookkeeping here in Australia, who seem set to topple the established behemoth, MYOB.

If you want to establish and maintain a competitive advantage in your business it’s important to cultivate a culture of innovation. Innovation is the conversion of ideas into commercially valuable outcomes that enhance the competitiveness of your business. This can come in the form of innovative changes to process, product, technology or administration.

When you become more competitive you make improvements to your business that will result in better performance. This could include creating new markets, increasing revenue or efficiency, reducing costs, gaining market share or happier customers.

Here are our 5 tips to innovate better in your business:

1. It’s potentially better to get people from outside of your field to help. Divergent thinkers tend to come up with better, more novel and innovative solutions. A recent study found that the greater the conceptual distance from the problem the more novel the solution.

2. The crowd is now playing a role in addressing some of the most pressing innovation and research questions that we face. To exclude crowdsourcing from your businesses innovation tool kit is to limit your potential for solutions.

3. Compromises made to reduce risk or avoid disruption rarely result in breakthrough innovation. Innovation is in its nature inherently risky. Embrace this and failure. But learn from it.

4. Innovation rarely occurs as a result of group consensus, groupthink coupled with risk tends to stifle progressive ideas. Initially the process can be best left to a small number of dedicated individuals. Remember, rarely did anyone you see as a leader in your industry tolerate the status quo or follow the rules to get there.

5. Innovation is not just about creating new products or services for your customers. Think about how you can innovate internally by making changes to process, technology or administration. This could include investing in new marketing programs that create new sales channels or using new technology to better manage your operations, creating more time for you to focus on more valuable activities that drive results.

What will you do today to innovate in your business?

IMAGE > YE LINGHAN, Gold.Circle.Tiger 02, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 99.5 × 150 cm. Courtesy Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong.