What is Innovation

I regard innovation as more than just idea creation. There's always lots of ideas. The important part is bringing the ideas to fruition. Bringing the idea to Market - That is innovation.

"forward-thinking design and innovation comes from a combination of insight and inspiration, and that the greatest ideas mean very little if you can’t experience them firsthand." - IDEO

Small businesses more than ever need to innovate to stay on top of their game. Sometimes the innovation is not about a new patentable technology, but could be as simple as cross-pollinating an idea from a different industry, different field of science or study into the business.

So the key to this, is having an open mind, diverse interests, curiosity and creativity. Some of the most established businesses lose market share to small companies that innovative by bringing creativity and radical technology to an old market. This creates a new start to the "S-curve" business life-cycle, creating a new wave to carry the market forward.

It has been the innovation in technology that has caused disruption and rapid demise to businesses that stay only focused on incremental changes to their business model or products.

So how do you innovate in your business ....

This article "21 ways to Innovate" by Paul Sloan talks about 21 ways to do so. A summary and comments follows, but I suggest you check out the article itself.

1. Ask Customers
2. Observe Customers (The American company IDEO is an expert at this.)
3. Cross pollinate from other industry ideas
4. use difficulties and complaints (sometimes your most difficult customers point the areas where creativity is required)
5. Combine
6. Eliminate
7. Ask your staff (The one place you can count on to have the most ideas for innovation. Providing the space and opportunity to explore these ideas is the job of the innovation leader. An innovative capacity audit is a great tool to find hidden pools of innovation, spot opportunities for innovation development initiatives and measure the competitive positioning of the business from an innovation perspective)
8. Plan
9. Run brainstorms
10. Examine patents (interestingly, patents were originally designed as an open forum for peer review of ideas and concepts.)
11. Collaborate (idea generation, knowledge development, is a social activity. Collaboration is a wonderful social activity to accelerate knowledge development, facilitate cross pollination and develop professional relationships)
12. Minimize or maximize
13. Run a contest
14. Ask - What if
15. Watch your competition
16. Outsource
17. use open innovation
18. Adapt a product to an unintended use
19. Try TRIZ
20. Go back in time
21. Use social networks