5 of the Best Ways to Innovate
Innovating is all about inventing/changing a process or product to enable your business to grow exponentially, and here we look at 5 of the best ways to innovate.
There are of course many many more but this is just a quick introduction which will hopefully allow you to think that you just might want to go innovate.
Collaborate being the first one.
So, you have thought of a way to improve a process or a piece of software (I am just using this as an example), and you know what you want it to do – but you are just the ideas person. This is where you find someone who has the missing skills to continue developing your idea.
It might even be more than one skill that you need – so you need someone to code and program, but you also need some research on it, or working with a focus group to see if there is a market for it. Collaboration is the main way you will progress this.
Staff – So what do we mean by this?
Those working with you and for you, will often be closer to the products or services and will be the ones listening to customer comments and seeing trends.
Encourage your staff to feed back and get involved – allow them to be part of it all, as after all, and yes, I am altering a phrase here often used for marriages – happy staff, happy business.
Nothing promotes a successful business than the staff and allowing them to have input and be part of the growth.
So, at number three then is Go Back In Time.
No, I don’t think you are the Doctor about to jump in the Tardis – what is meant is that potentially some years earlier you had a product that sold really well, but then sales dried up. Have you revisited and made changes to see if it would work again?
Just because something stopped selling doesn’t mean it won’t work again. Do some digging around, research etc and find out if a simple tweak could bring it up to date – or if it could be used for another purpose. There are lots of examples of well-known companies out there that took a product that was failing and re-invented it to something essential to our lives.
Ask What If?
Time for some lateral thinking, time to revisit assumptions made and boundaries – time to re-focus. Let’s use KFC as an example of this. They were struggling with the lower end of their market – those who were in a rush. So they brought in an agency who simply sat in one of their stores and watched footfall, who was buying what and what their habits were.
They discovered that a large number of students were coming in and simply buying french fries as they needed something quick, easy and inexpensive. After asking various questions and doing that lateral thinking, they came up with Popcorn Chicken – which is now a major seller for them.
Then finally – Eliminate.
What can you take away that is not needed? What needs to be removed to make it lighter/cheaper/faster/more appealing?
One of the most obvious examples of this of course is the old Sony Walkman – that eliminated speakers and became an iconic thing to have.
So, there we have it, a quick and slightly simplistic look at how to start – but I hope we have given you a few thoughts of what you can and can’t do.
Please do let us know if you have used other means to start the innovation process.
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