Business Innovation: The Life Blood of Your Company

Many of the most successful companies out there today have mastered the art of ingenuity.  Their businesses are known as pioneers and the energy in these organizations seems to be infused by the spirit of innovation.

In this time of exponential growth in technology and competition, the success and sustainability of a business can come down to this one simply thing:  Innovation.  The businesses that seem to stand the test of time are those that continuously generate fresh products or services that take those currently on the market to the next level.  Here are 7 ways to inspire and ignite ingenuity in your company and make you stand out above the rest:

Business Innovation in 7 Steps

1. Establish an Innovative Environment. Goran Ekvall of Lund University in Sweden has defined three conditions needed for a climate of innovation. Surprisingly they are trust, dynamism, and humour.  Often times when studying companies that outperformed others they found that these teams trusted one another, had a high level of energy and shared a common sense of humour.  Consider expressing your trust and enthusiasm for the capacity of your co-workers/employees, allow for unconventional work environments and allow space for fun as first steps to business innovation.

2. Allow Space for Creativity. According to the Roffey Park Management Institute, most flashes of inspiration come to people when they are away from work and not forcing their conscious brains to find solutions to their problems. For some, ideas come while mowing the lawn or taking the dog for a walk or playing golf or waiting on a railway station. Also, color, music and consistent breaks are known to stimulate right-brain creativity.

That is exactly the kind of thing companies such as Google had in mind in creating colorful workplaces with loose standards for expected desk time.  How can you allow space for creativity to emerge in your workplace?

3. Make New Connections. Making new connections between existing features of your product or service is a popular way to innovate. Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, said that he invented the Walkman because he wanted to listen to music while walking between shots on his golf course. How can you take your current products and find new uses?  Are there new functions that can be created for your product or new audiences that can benefit from your service?

4. Find Out What People Need. Necessity is a great spur to innovation. You can have a great idea but if no one needs it, it will remain on the shelf.  Instead, begin to notice what is needed around you.  What are your customers always yearning for?  Begin to notice what it is that would make your life and the life of your customers easier and see if you can develop a way to fill that need.

5. Test, Test, Test. Testing what works and what doesn’t may not be the quickest route to success, but it is often the surest way to business innovation and success. Thomas Edison, possible the greatest inventor and innovator of all time was the prime example of this, having recorded 1300 experiments that were complete failures before making the first light bulb work. But he was able to keep going because, as he said, he knew 1300 ways that it wasn’t going to work.  Persistence and dedication to your cause is key.

6. Adopt and Adapt. Swatch watchmakers had the realization that the more reliable their watches became, the less people needed to replace them.  And so to resolve this dilemma they adopted and adopted how other industries succeed.  In their case, they followed the foot steps of the fashion world by turning their watches into desirable fashion accessories with new designs each season. Now people buy Swatch watches not just to tell the time but because it’s cool to do so.

7. Learn From Nature. The natural world is the most ingenius, inventive system of all providing us with an endless supply of prototypes to use in our own world. Take Velcro, for example. Velcro was patented by Georges de Mestral in 1950 after he returned from a hunting trip covered in tiny burrs that had attached themselves to his clothing by tiny overlapping hooks. De Mestral quickly realized that here was an ideal technique to fasten material together.

Other innovative business strategies you can explore from nature are business guilds like plant guilds, stacking functions, natural progression and patterns, etc.  Who thought a class in permaculture would assist us in taking the business world by storm?

The history of the world is the history of innovation. Thomas Kuhn called each acceptance of a new innovation a “paradigm shift”. For once a new innovation becomes accepted, the world has changed for ever and can never go back to the way it was.  How can you bring business innovation to your company today?

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