Whether you have developed a product or service business, if you don’t innovate, eventually you will disappear. Competition is intensifying and most companies are fighting to retain their market positions and customer loyalty, making innovation a ‘must have’, just to stay in business!
If you want to succeed and grow your business further, you will need to develop and incorporate a strategic focus on innovation into your business plan.
I grew up in the vibrant, local Sydney fashion industry where my father was a leading Australian fashion manufacturer for over forty years. I evolved from fashion designer, and product manager in the manufacturing sector to fashion director for the 42 Grace Bros Department stores, which are now part of the Coles Myer Group, to my own design management consultancy. Very simply, this enabled me to understand and work with basic target marketing and design principles which now form the foundations upon which most innovations are developed. I have come the ‘full circle’, from business planning, strategic marketing planning, quality management to adult, corporate consulting and learning, to my latest entrepreneurial adventure, creating of my own innovative start-up, ImagineNation™.
So I have the solid experience, knowledge and intuitive understanding of the need for all businesses, if they want to survive and flourish and flow with the challenges of the 21st century, to make innovation a critical part of the way they evolve, define, lead and operate. As successful business owners, we all know that we need to be guided by a solid business plan and a marketing strategy to ensure that we create products and services that are needed and wanted by our customers. We also know that we need to have efficient, cost-effective processes and systems to make sure that we deliver high quality products and services to our customer, at an affordable price, on time.
Yet, many small business owners depend mainly on their own entrepreneurial energy and skills to drive innovation in their companies. This can not only be exhausting, cause burn out and alienate staff, it is neither sustainable nor able to be leveraged. Here are two opportunities to shift this:
- Work out simple ways to embed innovation into every aspect of your business:
- Improve your leadership style by adopting a facilitative style with your people and create activities that inspire innovation, like regular in-house innovation labs where people can contribute, debate and share ideas.
- Encourage people to challenge existing processes and the way things usually get done, and introduce new tools that teach people to problem solve in creative ways that generate new ideas for product, process or service improvements.
- Find disruptive ways to ‘rock people’s boats’, to encourage deviant input, and to maximise the diversity that exists in your business, teach people how to ask questions and have debates that challenge your usual conventional ways of doing things.
- Invest in your people’s ability ‘to learn fast by failing quickly’, make it safe for them to take intelligent risks and experiment with new ways of doing things.
- Be willing to constantly re-imagine, re-invent and re-energise your markets, products and services by making sure that you take time out regularly to retreat and reflect to generate new possibilities that could be turned into innovative business opportunities.
Your innovation journey starts with the first step, which is a commitment to innovation excellence and a willingness to learn how to adapt and build it across your business. You will then develop an integrated, stimulating, continuous and winning competitive edge that can never be surpassed or beaten, by anyone!
