When you are in the trenches day to day in your business, sometimes innovation is way down the list. It’s not that you don’t want to be innovative; it’s just that running the day to day of what you do is demanding and leaves little time for creativity.
However, if you fall into this trap, you could be limiting your business future. Innovation is the only thing that separates good businesses from great ones and guarantees profit growth.
Here are three ways to encourage innovation in your business without slowing your regular pace:
- Look around you. What is happening in your business, with your customers – what is working is and what isn’t? Now think on a global scale. Is this frustration something that is common to all clients or businesses? Can you make a process, approach or initiative that helps solve this problem not only for you, but for others? If so, get to work. Not only will you make your business more efficient, you just may have a product or service line that can be scalable.
- Take a moment to get out of your everyday. Do you have a holiday planned overseas? Are there any conferences you could attend that could give you different perspectives? If you are not going anywhere, can you watch a podcast or video that changes your view? Even logging onto TED sometimes to watch talks on unrelated but interesting topics can inspire you to innovate. After all, innovation is catching and sometimes you have to surround yourself with other innovative ideas to feel inspired.
- Turn up the heat. Look hard at your business and the services and products you offer. Are they the future? Even if you are making revenue from them, are they what drive your passion and vision for your business? If not, then perhaps you need to turn up the heat on your business and start planning a business without those lines in the future. Meaning you have the space and capacity to service other things that are more innovative and in line with your passion. While this can be scary as you lose guaranteed revenue for a while, it is also extremely liberating and allows your business to look longer term at growth.
Any way you look at it, to not innovate is to stand still and when you consider the pace in which our turns, you might as well go backwards. So take a deep breath and start thinking innovation today.
