Your company, whether it is small, medium or large business will always need to innovate. Innovations in new or improved products and services, business models, and processes are more than necessary if you want to stay ahead of your competition. So, you need to accelerate innovation in your company.
Personally, I don’t know or have met an entrepreneur who doesn’t want to make his business innovative business. They already have experience with innovation, because their company is something that was born after the innovation process that they have implemented. And, now after several years, everything looks so different. They want to innovate, but in reality, they simply cannot innovate.
Why? Because the innovation does not happen by itself, or something that will happen regardless of what we want. Innovation will need to be accelerated, or you as an entrepreneur will need to accelerate innovation in your small business.
1. Ensure That Innovation Process is Continuous Process in Your Company
As a first thing that you will need to check is whether the innovation process is a continuous process in your company. If you want to accelerate innovation in your small business, the innovation process will need to be the never-ending process.
Check process maps and workflow procedures related to your innovation process, or if you still don’t have documented processes in your company, start developing them. If the end of the process is not the beginning of the next cycle of the process than you will need to make changes.
2. Develop and Integrate Strong Innovative Culture Inside Your Company
You can have the greatly designed innovation processes, but if your company doesn’t have a strong innovative culture planted deep into the whole organization, you cannot expect that you will have successful innovations.
If you want to accelerate innovation in your small business, start developing an innovative culture among all organizational members.
3. Develop and Integrate Innovation Systems Into Your Company
To accelerate innovation, you will need really strong innovation systems on which you and your small business team will rely on when it comes to innovation. This means that you will need to develop and integrate systems that will answer the following questions:
- What type of innovations will the company focus their attention?
- How will the innovation process start?
- How the innovative ideas will be collected, recorded, analyzed, and implemented?
- Who is responsible for innovations?
- Who will be the leader of the specific innovation process?
4. Innovation Have Much More Faces Than You Can Imagine Now
When we talk about innovation, we don’t mean only about the innovation in products and services for your company. Innovation can be innovation in processes or innovation in business models additionally to products and services. Also, it can be incremental or radical. Innovation can be also disruptive innovation.
So, you will face many possibilities for innovations in your company as a usual thing that will need to be used for the future of your small business.
5. Ideas Can Come From Everywhere But, Only One Can Lead the Innovation Process
Yes, the ideas and keeping your innovation ideas pool always full are the responsibility of all your team members, but the leadership of the process will need to be clear. Having ideas means that your company is a creative company. But, creativity doesn’t mean innovation. Ideas will need to be implemented if you want an innovation.
A strong leader in the innovation process will accelerate the process of the successful implementation of the innovative ideas.
6. You Are the Most Responsible to Accelerate Innovation in Your Small Business
And as the last thing that I want to mention here is that you are the most responsible person to accelerate innovation in your company. This is only as a reminder for you because nobody else in your small business will have the bigger potential than you when it comes to the accelerating innovation.
