In one way or another, innovation is behind every successful company. After all, business is more competitive than ever, and companies—regardless of their size—must keep adapting to the shifting waves of customer demand to stay relevant. What works now might no longer be the best option later, which is why the best companies are often in the midst of change, relentlessly improving every aspect of their performance.
The Challenge of Being a Business Innovator
Even though being a business innovator is a common objective, it’s easier said than done, and many companies will admit to falling short of their own growth goals. Contrary to its popular image, innovation doesn’t always have to be flashy or grandiose. It’s not necessarily about overhauling your entire company or coming up with a brand new product. Most of the time, innovation is simply about making your business better, whether that’s through tweaking your processes for efficiency, giving a product upgrade to satisfy customers better, implementing a new marketing strategy, or offering your product to a new market segment.
While companies of all sizes need to innovate, it’s more easily done by small to medium-sized businesses, that can pivot much faster without too much bureaucracy getting in the way. For many small businesses that are just starting, innovation can be their lifeblood. In a fast moving disruptive marketplace the rule of the jungle is innovate or die.
How to Achieve Consistent Business Innovation
Regardless of what stage your company is in, you can become a brilliant business innovator by incorporating certain habits or practices. Let’s look at some now.
Connect with your customers
Although you might be confident that you know your customers well because of initial market research, gathering feedback from them has to be continuous. In fact, this is one of the easiest ways to drive innovation in your company. Business owners have an edge during the startup phase because they’re often interacting directly with their customers, but as roles get more specialised and management becomes remote, they rarely spend time on the frontlines anymore.
You can see the impact of this by spending even just a few hours with your customers while observing them and noting down their complaints, difficulties, and suggestions. Do you notice customers struggling with a certain part of your process, or are they coming up with similar questions?
Beyond observation, make it a point to get more direct feedback through surveys, questionnaires, or even suggestion boxes. One-on-one interviews can work too, but it might be helpful to have a third party do this to help customers feel more open.
Just from this, you can already collect several ideas for innovation. The most commonly mentioned ones are definitely worth looking into, and your team can evaluate these afterwards to choose which to address first. Because your efforts will be visible to customers, they’ll appreciate that you’re trying to connect with them and you care about their increased satisfaction.
Include innovation in your business strategy
Don’t make innovation an afterthought. When planning your business strategy, set aside space for innovation and emphasise its importance to your business by designating specific goals and metrics for it. By having clear metrics that you can assess after a certain period of time, you’re giving your business an additional push to take more action in that direction.
While innovation as a whole can sound vague or all-encompassing, many companies use metrics such as:
- How much has efficiency improved (in terms of time or number of products created)?
- How many suggestions for innovation are generated every month?
- How many innovative ideas have been implemented within the quarter?
You can even set aside part of your budget for innovation or for testing out new approaches while filling in each of your team leaders on this. While the responsibility to innovate falls on every member of your company, team leaders play a strong role here. When you hold meetings with your management team, ask them regularly if they have anything new that they want to try, and train them to encourage ideas from their team members.
Encourage a culture of innovation
To be a business innovator, your company culture has to encourage innovation. Being innovative isn’t a fixed characteristic that only some people in your company have. In line with a growth mindset, everyone can practice innovative thinking and get better at it, and by training your employees to be innovative, you can maximise the benefits for your business. It’s your employees who have a close knowledge of your business processes, which adds up to a 360-degree perspective of what’s really going in.
Aside from holding trainings and workshops on creative thinking, you can nurture innovation organically by conducting regular brainstorming sessions. Alternatively, set a theme for each meeting such as “What can we improve about…?” and focus on a specific aspect of your company, announcing it in advance so people will have time to think over it. As much as possible, encourage open communication too within your business so people feel free to share their ideas. Interdisciplinary thinking sparks innovation, so put together teams that normally don’t interact during lunch or work breaks.
Be on the alert for trends
As much as you have to be aware of what’s going on in your business, you also have to be up-to-date with industry trends. Look for the thought leaders and top publications and blogs in your industry and subscribe to them across different platforms. This way, you can simply scroll through your feed every day to get an overview of the major developments. Whatever industry you’re in, you might also want to keep track of major reports or survey results, which can tell you directly which trends are coming up in the future.
An app like Pocket can be useful for bookmarking links that you can delve into more during your own time, and you can share these with other people in your business too.
On top of this, real-life networking is also essential for innovation, so it’s a worthwhile investment to attend industry-related events, conferences, and training. For more ideas, check out what’s going on with similar businesses in other countries or even your competitors, who are likely to have an online presence.
Being innovative doesn’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need to wait around for inspiration, either. When you follow at least one of these practices for several weeks, you’ll notice positive changes within your company, and you’ll be on your way to becoming a brilliant business innovator.
