How To Practice Innovativeness In Your Startup Company
Innovation is an idea that has been transformed into practical reality. For a business, this is a product, process, or business concept, or combinations that have been activated in the marketplace and produce new profits and growth for the organisation. This could also mean taking steps to improve or replace business processes to increase efficiency and productivity, or to enable the business to extend the range or quality of existing products and/or services developing entirely new and improved products and services – often to meet rapidly changing customer or consumer demands or needs.
Being innovative in your startup company or SME in Africa translates to successfully exploiting new business ideas. Marketplaces – whether local, regional, national or global – are becoming highly competitive. Competition has increased due to wider access to new technologies and the increased trading and knowledge-sharing opportunities offered by the Internet.
Innovations are all around us. From exciting new technologies to new startup business models, the very idea of innovation is taking off just as fast as the businesses that embrace it. Regardless of this fact, though, practising innovativeness in your startup company or SME can truly be a tough nut to crack. You see, the reality is that even though many African entrepreneurs want their businesses, products, services and employees to be “innovative”, most of their businesses still end up with anti-innovation cultures without even realising it.
This sad reality is mostly because so many of these young businesses are focused on cost, efficiency and short-term growth, rather than creativity and a longer-term mindset. This can leave little room for fresh ideas. To be truly innovative in your business, it’s important to understand that the mechanisms needed to grow a business are often different from those that simply keep it from falling apart. You have to be willing to explore a little, put up some uncertainties, and adopt some different ways of thinking.
This guide explains how you can make innovation a key business process at your startup. It also outlines the different approaches you can take to get you there. The guide gives you advice on planning for innovation because creating the right business environment to develop your ideas is vital to the success of your business regardless of your chosen industry today:
1. Analyse the marketplace
There’s no point considering innovation in a vacuum. Innovation is an important entrepreneurial function for business especially a startup. It is not enough for your business to provide just any economic goods and services; it must provide better and more economic ones. Your business doesn’t need to grow bigger, but it is necessary that it constantly grows better. To achieve maximum proficiency in your innovations then, you must take the time to research and analyse your market place.
Having a greater understanding of your marketplace from the very start will enable you to create a sound business strategy to establish and grow your brand into one that’s better than the competition.
To move your business forward, study your marketplace and understand how innovation can add value to your customers. Market research can be carried out at various stages of a new idea’s life cycle, from pre-launch and beyond.
2. Identify opportunities for innovation
In every business niche or marketplace, there is a discrepancy between what is and what should be. This is a key to developing wildly successful businesses, but it’s tricky.
When you identify opportunities for innovation in your marketplace, only then can you work to adapt your product or service to the way your marketplace is changing. You could also develop your business by identifying a completely new product.
You could innovate by introducing new technology, techniques or working practices – perhaps using better processes to give more consistent product quality. For instance, If your research shows people have less time to go to the stores, you could overhaul your distribution processes, offering customers a home-delivery service, possibly tied in with online and telephone ordering.
Again, suppose your research shows that your chosen industry is saturated with cheap products, rather than undercut your competitors on price. In that case, you could innovate by revamping your marketing to emphasise your merchandise quality, and then charging a premium for your improved services.
3. Study and Learn from Your Customers
Ensuring that your innovative ideas respond to your customers’ needs will help your startup company evolve as you better understand more of those needs. You have to involve your customers, learn their likes and dislikes, and ask them how their customer experience can be improved. Heinz noticed that people stored their sauce jars upside down so they designed an upside-down bottle. So don’t just ask them, watch them.
If you simply ask your customers how you could improve your product or service they will give you plenty of ideas for incremental innovations. Typically they will ask for new features or that you make your product cheaper, faster, easier to use, available in different styles and colours etc. Listen to these requests carefully and choose the ones that will really payback.
4. Capture As Much Of Your Ideas As Possible
Make sure to record the results of your brainstorming sessions and other innovation efforts. Collecting new ideas and sharing them within the organisation is a critical part of innovation. Similar to harnessing energy, you need a centralized way of capturing ideas at your startup so they can be organised, prioritised, and implemented effectively.
You can do this by having everyone write on Post-It notes or whiteboards, having someone record each session on video, or taking pictures of whiteboards and notes with smartphones and uploading them to your team on slack.
Maybe it won’t turn out to be such a great idea. Or it may need more work. Or it could be the greatest idea ever. Don’t worry about that. You can converge and prioritise and edit later. Right now, just get it down while it’s still fresh in your mind.
Capture that idea, move on, and come up with another idea. Because that really is one of the keys to success in ideating. The “big idea” can come from something you didn’t pay attention to at the time, so being able to go back and review ideas is very valuable.
5. Get everyone in the company involved
Marketers, graphic designers and other “creative” types are used to being called on to innovate—which sometimes leads to stale ideas. Don’t limit innovation to key executives or the “usual suspects.”You can encourage intrapreneurship at your organization with such simple steps as establishing where your employees can go with their ideas. Instating a “no idea is a bad idea” policy, gathering support your employees need to try out their ideas letting them pitch decision-makers at your company.
Bringing different departments together sparks innovation, as people rub elbows with others they don’t normally come in contact with. Some of the most innovative ideas may come from your frontline employees—after all; they’re the ones who engage with your customers, product or service every day.
6. Remain Flexible In Your Execution
Typical business management practices in companies of all sizes favour efficiency and process at the expense of experimentation. But being innovative requires a test-and-learn approach that includes taking some risks and trying different things. Some won’t work out but those “failures” will pave the way for the things that do work and that will help your business grow.
The fundamental nature of innovation is that nothing is certain. Businesses that are best at innovating are often dominated by ambiguity and change. So get used to it and create an environment that allows for experimentation, invention and exploration.
Finally, understand that being innovative in business is a game of probabilities. It increases your chances to react to changes, discover new opportunities and foster competitive advantage. But to reap all these benefits, you need to set your employees – and yourself – on a path to learning new things daily, as well as thinking outside the box.
