My purpose is to Inspire you to take a proactive stance on change and or innovation by deciding how important it is to you.
Give you some practical tips you can use within your business to foster change.
In business, we are constantly faced with change and innovation. It can be hard to know how to embrace these things and make them work for our businesses. In this blog post, we’ll explore some ways that you can make change and innovation work for you and your business. I’ll also be challenging you to think about how you can innovate in your own business.
I spent many years working in Innovations, researching opportunities to understand consumer needs, defining, and developing solutions & business models and bringing them to market. In that time of course I’ve learnt lots from the boardroom to the shopfloor plus lots of innovation and marketing techniques. My biggest learning however is the importance of people. If effective change is going to happen, someone needs to lead it, others must believe it and people need to make it happen.
So, my first tip – to help you embrace change and innovation, is think about the people and ask questions like:
Who will make it happen?
Who will benefit?
What’s in it for them?
What’s their perspective on the change?
How can I lead change for and with the people?
These questions are likely to unearth, opportunities and changes that you can think and act upon.
Let’s be clear – Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field. We are not talking invention here!
Before we go into the how, let’s consider why we choose to embrace change.
Let’s, keep this brief as there are primarily two sides to the same coin:
The negative – Grow or die! – Assuming change is a constant (the complacent can forget that!), then if we don’t adapt (change) then eventually we will become irrelevant or extinct.
The positive – Change creates opportunities for those that decide to look and act.
What drives you to make the necessary changes to your business can indeed come from both sources. The level of proactivity you take is up to you. This will depend on both your attitude to life and the market conditions you are in, let me briefly elaborate on each.
Your attitude – You’ll no double sit somewhere on a spectrum from Pioneer, willing to take risks and lead the way at one extreme, to Follower at the other extreme – those that move much later. There are pros and cons to each.
The market conditions you operate within – Let’s illustrate this with a question to get you thinking: How relevant will my current product or service be in 10 years’ time? (or less). Thinking about this on a market level, will help you focus on the consumer’s/client’s needs, rather than any immediate competitive threats.
Then, think about your own goals and objectives – to define how important change and innovation are to you.
If you are close to retirement, have no intention of selling your business and you are confident your product/service has legs beyond your planned retirement your need to innovate, and change could well be low. That’s ok as long as – you define your success and what’s important to you.
I expect that most people reading this will have more ambition than that, even if they do not want to get to the stage where they have the freedom not to have to work to support their desired lifestyle.
If you are going to put your valuable time and effort into a business, you might as well build an asset of value that creates profits for you, your family, your community or chosen benefactors. I encourage business owners to build business as if they were going to sell them. The choice of selling can come later of course – yet work can start today on building the value. One of the major factors that influence the value of your business is its future profit earning potential. Businesses’ which are forward looking, stay relevant and adapt to change will score higher here.
Take a moment now to consider how important change and innovation are to you and your business?
If change and innovation are important to you read on.
Or I could say if long-term sustainable business growth is important to you and or the legacy you want to create read on…
P.S. Also read on if you risk going out of business if you don’t adapt!
11 Tips on how to embrace change / innovation in your business?
I’ve added a question here to encourage you to think and act in the areas that stand out for you.
- Foster a culture of innovation: Encourage creativity and experimentation within your organisation by creating an environment that supports innovation. Empower your employees to generate new ideas and take calculated risks. How well do you inspire creativity amongst your team and create the right conditions that enable ideas to come to life?
- View change and innovation as a source of competitive advantage: In my mind this is a mindset shift from innovation as a nice to have addition (expense), to a value creating source of inspiration for long term growth. How can change enhance your unique value proposition?
- Stay up to date with customer/client lifestyle changes which influence needs, desires, wants, habits: Tip – don’t just think in isolation here also consider knock on effects of things. Let’s give you an example – I live in Tring, Herefordshire which pre COVID would have been described as a commuter town. Now many of the inhabitants have discovered hybrid working and are commuting to London by train far less often. If I operate a coffee concession at the station (which for those that don’t know is miles from town) I’m likely to be facing a reduction footfall. To counter this, I’m likely to want to make some changes! That could be a simple as selling more to each customer to maintain and grow profits, or it could be a change of location into town – those hybrid workers will need to get out for a coffee! How are your clients/customers’ needs changing? Are you asking/getting regular feedback?
- Make learning and continuous improvement part of your business DNA. A learning culture will have all kind of spin of benefits for change. Let’s say you were able to improve what I regard as the number one ‘soft’ skill in business communications – How might that help change, remembering my initial point that people are key. What’s the next action you can take to enhance learning and continuous improvement in your business?
5. Stay up to date with industry trends: Keep abreast of new technologies and trends in your industry by attending industry events and reading relevant publications. Identify areas where your business can capitalise on these trends. Who are you talking to or listening to about what’s next for your industry?
6. Make someone responsible and track – what gets measured gets done right! And if something needs to get done expectations need to be clear and responsibility taken. Who oversees innovation within your business? If you are a SME owner, it could well be you. Ask yourself how could I do an ever-better job?
7. Take calculated risks: Embracing change and innovation requires taking risks. However, it’s important to take calculated risks that are aligned with your business goals and objectives. One great way to reduce risks and experiment is to test and measure things before you scale up. What might be worth you testing on a small scale?
8. Collaborate with other businesses: Partnering with other businesses can be a great way to share knowledge and resources and to leverage each other’s strengths to drive innovation. Who might you collaborate with for the greater good of your industry?
9. Embrace new technology: Change does not have to be the product or service itself – it might be how you deliver or execute it. What has changed that could enable us to do things more effectively or efficiently?
10. Try zero based budgeting: I’m suggesting this to encourage you to think about what needs to be achieved first and then allocate funds – this avoids the kind of myopic behaviour that can kill business – that stems from ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ type of thinking! How could you invest your money differently to achieve a better result?
11. Review your long-term strategy: Having clear goals and objectives set prior to initiating any changes can help keep efforts on track and maximise their impact. One of my favourite questions here: Ask yourself – what business are we in? You need to go beyond the obvious here – do get in touch if you want to discuss that one.
12. Don’t stop – come back and revisit this list and add to it. Let me know what you would add…
Let’s recap with the key questions to ask yourself about your business:
- How relevant will my current product or service be in 10 years’ time? (or less)
- How important are change and innovation to you and your business?
- Which tips on embracing change will you take forward?
Action
What specific actions are you going to take to embrace change and innovation in your business now?
If you’ve any comments, questions, or feedback – please do reach out to the Author of this article
By James Gentle