5 More Tips to Implement Innovation in Your Business

Your company has tangible equity in the image it puts forth. That image includes visibility within the industry and your target market; the effort made to promote your logo and brand name, introduce new products and services, and showcase core competencies to clients; and your pioneering spirit that drives you to improve offerings and satisfying customer needs. What can a company do implement innovation? Consider five more tips:

1. Stress the importance of innovation: Ensure employees know you want to hear their ideas. Unless they understand how innovating your business processes can keep you competitive, efforts at encouraging creative thinking risk falling flat.
2. Schedule time for brainstorming and experimentation: Don’t attempt to be innovative on the fly. For example, altering standard procedures on the production line can easily result in unsafe conditions or unpredictable, unacceptable results. A team involved in group brainstorming session is likely to be more effective than the sum of its individual parts.
3. Encourage change: Broadening experiences is a great way to spark ideas, and short-term job swaps can introduce a fresh perspective to job roles. Encourage people to look at how other businesses benchmark, even those in other industries, and consider how they can be adapted or improved.
4. Be supportive and excuse minor mistakes: Respond enthusiastically to all ideas and never make someone feel foolish for offering an idea. A certain amount of risk taking is inevitable with innovation. Allow people to learn from their mistakes. Never put off the creative flow by penalizing those whose ideas don’t work out.
5. Reward creativity: Motivate individuals or teams who come up with winning ideas by actively recognizing innovation, perhaps through a reward campaign. You could even demonstrate your recognition that not all ideas work out by rewarding those who just have a rich flow of suggestions, regardless of whether they’re put into action.

-Vince DiCecco, Your Personal Business Trainer