When businesses consider what their goals should be, “innovation” tends to be a key word that managers, owners, and team leads throw around often. But what does innovation mean, and how can it foster the development and growth of a business?
Innovation, the hottest buzzword of the time, is typically taken to mean “doing things in a new and unique way.” This is true, of course, but an understanding of innovation and its role in boosting business should not stop there. Innovation is merely changed in a positive direction; in other words, it is growth. If a business improves a process, saves time, cuts costs, or increases sales, all of that is innovative, regardless of whether new processes are used.
This growth-focused mindset is beneficial to a business —most of the time. Some companies get so hung up on the focal point of growth that they fail to produce any substantial results. In order to best encourage positive growth (innovation) and ensure that the company continues to succeed without becoming hyper-fixated, business owners and managers will need to consider a few important aspects.
Forget “Progress”
The idea of progress or success is a powerful motivator—often too powerful, in fact. It is easy to want to generate and implement new ideas (after all, one cannot innovate without experimenting) and then see profits, sales, or engagements soar. However, this is rarely what actually happens.
The “fail fast, fail often” is the most important point to pick up here. Failure will happen; it is inevitable when experimenting with new ideas. A goal- or progress-oriented company will likely become discouraged at these failures, viewing them as setbacks, which can hamper further fruitful experimentation later; human beings have a natural inclination to avoid failure when possible.
What is most important is to view failures as an opportunity to learn. No failure is without a point; whether a company learns what consumers don’t like, what money isn’t worth spending, or which suppliers aren’t reliable, this information is valuable going forward. So forget the standard notion of “progress” as “success” and instead see it as “learning.” This will equip the company with a more resilient and informed outlook from which it can walk toward huge success on a path paved by failures.
Foster Diversity
Ever felt like a team should be able to solve a problem or create a solution, yet somehow they simply cannot? One way to overcome this and create a more stable and innovative business is by diversifying—and not just within the market. Encouraging diversity within a team will allow for new and unique viewpoints to be brought forth upon issues, shining light on areas of need or offering alternative options that were previously unconsidered.
Do not stop any considerations of diversity at merely the thought of ethnicity; while it’s true that people from around the globe will approach issues and tackle problems differently, a powerful team comes from more than this. Consider also gender, sexuality, class, religion, and skill diversities to truly ensure that a team will be able to offer a broader and more creative range of solutions to a problem.
Focus
Ask ten businesses what innovation is to them and you will receive ten different answers. Each company’s needs—and the innovation required to meet them—are unique, and for that reason, it is crucial that a business and its leadership consider their company as an individual. In other words, innovation, growth, and development must be centered around an area of focus, not a nebulous concept of “improvement.”
What a competitor is doing may be completely ineffective for your business. Large-scale structural changes may not be what a company needs despite their appeal as “big, powerful, complex” solutions. Just as Amazon needs to focus its efforts primarily in shipping and Apple is focused more on crafting impressive, never-before-seen technology, consider what the business in question needs to focus on. What is its primary driver of success, and how can this specific area be improved?
Invest—and Not With Money
When the concept of investments arises, the most common rabbit trail to follow is one of money—make wise fiscal choices, set aside emergency funds, and work out beneficial agreements with suppliers, partners, and creditors. While this is certainly true and an important part of optimizing the spend of a business, investing can go far beyond dollars and cents.
The company’s structure hinges not on products or payments but on people. Ensuring that team members—and especially management—are invested in innovation and progress will go a long way toward the success of any new ideas. Even when a business has money in abundance and a veritable trough of new ideas and experiments to try, a disengaged or discouraged team will take the floor right out from under any attempts at progress. Leadership and team members must buy in to the improvements and culture for the business to succeed in innovating.
Now Is the Best Time
Innovation need not be reserved for some undefined “future” point when the business is somehow more prepared, more financially stable, among other examples. To grow and foster progress, a company does not need to make vast, sweeping changes that could incur large costs in either money, production, or employees. Small changes can have a significant impact on a business and, in fact, are ideal places to start.
Remember, however, that like any experiment, variables need to be controlled.
Businesses that are interested in reevaluating their processes and choices should do so one by one; even if a company has compiled an extensive list of things to change or try, these options should be given time. If everything changes at once, the factor that caused the success (or failure) will be buried among myriad changes and turn out to be difficult to find. Instead, offer up a single change, wait a couple weeks, and then evaluate its effect on the business to ensure that true, effective testing is being done.