Fostering Innovation: Why You Need It and How to Get More of It

Guest post.

Successful businesses are built on innovation. If not for continual innovation, we wouldn’t be in the digital age eagerly anticipating the direction technology will take and wondering what is possible and what comes next. We’d have fewer companies like OpenAI, and more like Blockbuster.

Innovation is built into our way of life. From the very first automobile to the first mobile phone and the current explosion of AI and its capabilities, innovation is the cornerstone of wealth creation.

As a small business owner, embracing innovation and ensuring that your company is geared towards supporting creativity and pushing the boundaries is vital to help you stay relevant and ensure you continue to offer value to customers.

Here are six considerations to keep in mind as you build a culture of innovation in your business.

Avoid Becoming Too Efficient

Business “best practices” often lean toward leaner models of working. They’re about improving efficiency, reducing waste, and basically running to peak efficiency. All of which is good.

However, an over-emphasis on efficiency to achieve near-perfect, zero-waste performance can quash creativity and look unfavorably on those who think outside of the box.

Instead, build “failure” into your mode and allow your team to explore and experiment. Give them the room to make mistakes, put things to the test, and generally let their imagination run wild to help you embrace innovation and keep pushing boundaries.

To compete over the long term, you need to out-innovate the other major players in the industry so you can embrace change and support growth.

Always Look Forward

No matter how successful your business is today, you need to keep looking forward. Whether you’re enjoying tremendous success or struggling to meet payroll, tomorrow is another day, and your fortunes can turn in the blink of an eye.

Don’t dwell on the past, or even too much on the present; look at where you can be, where the market is headed, and your possibilities. Use resources such as the blog BuildOps for a deeper insight into different areas of businesses.

Network with others in your industry, join relevant associations, and ensure you know the direction of your sector, what is next on the horizon, and what you need to be doing it either improve your business and what you do or build any successes you might be enjoying right now.

A great example of this is BlackBerry, which is credited with developing the first smartphone. At its peak, it had over 85 million subscribers worldwide in September 2011. However, the rise of Samsung and Apple meant that BlackBerry faced some steep competition. Over the years, its market share dwindled as it struggled to compete and retain its authenticity.

And while it did bring new products to the market, it never returned to the peak of its 2011 success, and today it has a 0% share of the smartphone market, while Samsung and Apple hover around 19% each as of the first quarter of 2023.

Uncertainty Is Good

Achieving nearly perfect operating efficiency might feel like a good target to aim for. However, perfection doesn’t leave much room for creativity and innovation. To push forward and ensure that your company can keep up with changes in the market and consumer habits and is poised to embrace new developments, embrace uncertainty and give your people the scope to experiment.

Nothing new can come from perfection (innovation means change, and why would anyone change perfection?), and no business can survive if it doesn’t embrace new ideas, products, and methods over time.

Letting go of the pursuit of operational perfection and efficiency allows creative ideas to the forefront, creating an environment where people can experiment, fail, and bring their ideas to life. Without this, you won’t know what you are capable of as a company, nor will you be in a position to compete with other companies that might be allowing precisely this to happen.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Emulating

When we are young, we learn by copying others; the majority of what people learn when growing up is done by emulating others, and to some extent, this continues into adulthood. In business, however, copying others is often frowned upon. But you needn’t shy away from this.

Look at your market; how many other people are selling what you sell? How many TV, or toothpaste, or automotive brands are there selling what seems to be the same thing? Developing similar but superior products is often how innovation comes about.

The first practical TV was brought to the market in the 1930s, and over time, different companies have built on this technology to make changes and improvements. For example, TV went from black and white to color in 1954; Fujitsu brought the first plasma flat-screen TV to life in 1964; and in the UK, in 2021, streaming service Sky brought Sky Glass to the market, a full 4K TV with QLED HDR display that is capable of streaming TV direct without the use of of an additional box, to offer something new to their subscribers.

Look at what others are doing now instead of copying it exactly, look at what it is missing, where there is a gap in the market for something different, what consumers are looking for in relation to this product, and how you can improve it.

It’s not about bringing a brand new idea or concept to fruition all the time; it’s about looking at what is possible and what the market is looking for at the time, and often it’s about improving on what is on offer rather than inventing something completely different.

Small Changes Are Good

You don’t always need to make significant discoveries; these massive innovations aren’t always as successful as you think they might be, nor might the industry be ready for huge changes (remember Blu-ray disks?). So don’t be afraid of making small changes. You don’t need to be making audacious claims and seek to bring something new, never-done-before to life.

Find success in the small things, the new ways, or add to what you do to offer value to your customers. Bigger isn’t always better; smaller changes can be far more successful and effective for your company than reinventing the wheel.

Focus on offering something no one else does; add a new twist to something you already do; look for different concepts and different uses for your products or services to move into different markets and build it up from there.

Embrace Innovation Company Wide

Innovation can be stifled if you are restricting it to a certain department or a specific group of people. While you might have the movers and shakers within the company, encourage everyone to be forthcoming with their ideas and allow them the scope to get stuck in and bring ideas to life.

Though you still need to stay on top of day-to-day operations, you also need to be willing to let people get creative with what they do to help you find new ideas.

For example, if you keep your call handlers or customer service agents strictly to a script when dealing with inquiries, and don’t let them deviate or think outside of the box on calls to help problem solve, you might never find a new or different way you can help people solve common problems.

Giving people the bandwidth to go off the beaten track can often yield outstanding results and can be instrumental in innovation and helping your company improve what it does.

Looking forward, allowing the space to get creative, embracing ideas, failure, and experimentation are all ways you can ensure that your company is built for success and you are able to stay on top of the market and meet customer demands, expectations, and changes in buying preferences and needs over the years.