Competition is getting fiercer, technology is advancing faster, and market preferences are leaning towards newer products and services. For enterprises to have a continuous upward curve in their performance and remain relevant to the changing times, they need to look for ways to constantly innovate themselves and consistently improve their business.
Entrepreneurs see the importance of innovation to keep their businesses going. They’re always on the lookout for ideas that will improve their product offerings, better their services, widen their reach and be ahead of other players in the industry.
Here are a few examples of how entrepreneurs implement novel ideas in their businesses and how such ideas impact their organisations.
Online Marketplace and Customer Education Sessions
“We have recently launched a number of innovations, one of the standouts would be our new online Marketplace. We understand that our partners prefer to engage with us in various methods,” said Nick Clift, Co-founder at Otto and Founder of DWM Solutions.
“Through feedback from our partners, we identified that there was a great opportunity to create a Marketplace where they could have a customised portal specific to their businesses that would provide standardised solutions which ensure they are always procuring items aligned to their business requirements,” he added.
As a company that is humanising technology, Nick and his team makes sure that they are able to help their clients with all the technical things that help their business grow. “The second (innovation) is our regular Customer Education Sessions where our team run a 45-min session for clients on various subject, e.g., Cyber Security best practices, data management, Office 365 tips and tricks. These sessions add value to our clients and the feedback has been very positive,” he explained.
Creative Leadership Team and Research & Development
Innovation is what drives the business of Nitasha Badhwar, Founder and CEO of Immersify and Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sunpower Renewables. “Being heavily R&D-driven, innovation is naturally a core business value for us and a continuous reality. Innovation for us is more than just implementing new technology, solution, or process. It is our culture and one of our cornerstones – something that we come back to in good and bad times,” she remarked.
“We have learnt that a creative leadership team tends to be the ultimate driving force of innovation within an organisation, and we are lucky to have one. Our core team realises that with innovation there is no place for complacency. Therefore, we had to set up an innovation-friendly environment with systems and processes that support the initiative, creativity and R&D. One of the best things we did was to appoint a Product Manager to coordinate between different teams and prepare a business case to prioritise and justify adoption and creation of certain innovations over others, all measurable through keys metrics like ROI,” Nitasha expounded.
She added, “This helped us realise that we need to implement new technologies for faster and smoother product development resulting in the recent purchase of a new 3D printer that has helped improve R&D timelines by over 30%.”
Apart from this, Nitasha and her team continue to do hands-on research to know how else they can innovate their products and services. According to her, “Another key practice that we follow regularly is providing an immersive on the ground experience in different countries to our staff where they learn how to implement in real-time prudent and creative strategies to problem solve and overcome stumbling blocks. This is further strengthened by coming back to the R&D facilities, using state of the art equipment and working with other innovative minds to create a long term, paradigm-shifting solution. This two-step immersive training has created many a brainchild in our company, including our Cleo solar generator.”
Furthermore, Nitasha shared, “This model is famously termed as ‘Jugaad’ (Hindi term roughly translates as overcoming harsh constraints by improvising an effective solution using limited resources), a concept taught at Harvard Business School and has been a great learning experience for all of us.”
Micro innovations and experimenting and piloting new ways
John Bevitt, Managing Director at Honeycomb Strategy, admitted that “We’re big fans of ‘micro innovations’ or the little things that can help to make our jobs easier or add more value to the clients.”
True enough, innovations do not necessarily have to be big as they can also be done in small actions but can result in a huge impact on one’s business. John shared, “In the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, he talks about how a performance coach for the British cycling team used a strategy called the “aggregation of marginal gains” to turn the team around and win the Tour de France, essentially by making a 1% margin for improvement in everything they did that added up to remarkable improvement.”
With this, what John does in his business is that “We encourage something similar, always looking for opportunities for improvement. Every team WIP starts with a short ‘tips and tricks’ session where the team can share shortcuts and hacks that they’ve found to be really useful. We’ve actually built this philosophy into our systems and processes as well – we’ve defined our processes as the ‘current best way we think we can do something.’ This gives the team permission to experiment and pilot new ways of doing things, and if it’s better, we change the process.”
Innovation: a road to the future
Most of what we have and use today are products of innovation, and they can change 5 or more years down the road. This shows that we are constantly developing and always finding opportunities for improvement. It is a path towards a more progressive future, not only for your business but also for the communities and societies you serve. Take a deep look into your business and see the areas where you can innovate, introduce new ideas, and become a changemaker.