Why Innovation Is The Seed Of Success

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Innovation in business, refers to creating more effective processes, products, and services as well as implementing these new ideas with conviction and promise. It is a great way to improve your brand and create dynamic products. Innovation allows you to change your business model and make necessary changes to the pre-existing business to ensure it delivers better, often and accurately.   

Innovation is a great way to grow your business but as an SME you may be wondering how this can help you in such a way? Innovation is not an overnight success but rather a set of steps that lead to an end result. The successful implementation of new ideas is crucial to your business. You need to constantly look at ways to be able to improve your businesses’ processes and functions and bring new and improved ideas to the table. Innovation can also help increase its efficiency and, most importantly, improve its profitability in the long run. 

Where Do I Begin? 
Innovation is different with every company because they all have different niches and goals. Work out what your goal is and what you want to achieve first and then you can work on how to improve it. Then you begin with looking at a list of things that you can do to change things up and start to work through them one by one. 

1. Copy someone else's idea (slyly of course, and smartly) - don’t outright copy an idea word for word but rather use it as inspiration for your own business, as well as being able to adapt it to your brand. Other ideas are copied all the time, it isn’t stealing but rather adapting and modifying them to make them work for you. We all feed off each other’s ideas hence why niches and businesses exist at all. 
   
2. Ask customers what they want - do your market research and be sure that you have everything you need in terms of demographic. You need to know your audience and know what they want and when they want it. Without that you are really unable to ever get to the deep nitty gritty of your brand. 
   
3. Observe customers - see how they behave and what they are looking at. See what they are asking on email and on social media and what types of images they like to look at. This will help build a picture of how you can innovate your brand and shape it up to be more like what they want. It is like building a business model. 
   
4. Use difficulties and complaints to your advantage - if someone complains that you don’t have enough choice, then you know that is one way to expand your business. If someone says they want to see more inspired products then you can innovate your brand to try something new and outside the box. Innovation is all about taking chances and risks. 
   
5. Combine and eliminate - combine things that work and eliminate things that don’t work. Using old systems and ways that aren’t serving you anymore is completely useless. You want to innovate your systems in such a way that you can see the results happen slowly over time. Cut out things that aren’t working. Change things up and expand on things that are. Invest time and money into that. It will work in your favour. 
   
6. Ask your staff - your staff can sometimes see the bigger picture better than you can. Keep your staff happy and communicate with them.
   
7. Plan ahead - what do you want to happen over time and are there any things that you can do here and now?
   

Improve the digital presence
Your website is an important part of your marketing. A well-maintained website can help you gain an advantage in your niche. It will also improve your business image and give you a head start on other businesses, especially if it is well designed and looks good. Once you have achieved this, you will want to market your website to the best of your ability and this begins with SEO.  With technical SEO you can really get to the core of what you need for your business. Technical SEO refers to websites that assist search engines and will index your site effectively. This is how your website can organically rank on Google searches. The higher up your ranking, the more likely chance of people seeing you as well as people putting their faith in you. 

This is important because when your website is faster, and user friendly as well as being understandable for search engines you are improving your business in general and innovating your marketing efforts. An SEO specialist will be able to bring you your target readers more effectively as well as being able to help your content rank higher in search results and drive good quality traffic which could translate easily into sales and more clicks. It is number one on the list for business innovation. Without a good digital presence there is very little chance of having a huge success. Most people look for companies online now, there is very little need for the yellow pages anymore; with everything going digital, this is also a positive to the planet. Less waste and consummation of materials. Digital is the future and it’s time to jump on the bandwagon, if you haven’t already. 

Making a new product or service
This is definitely one form of innovation that can lead to big results.  As long as it is a product that someone actually wants. This is exactly why market research and databases can help you to determine what may work and what won’t. First of all you should consider the following for any type of innovation before you start the process. How to:

• Improve productivity within your team
  
• Reduce costs massively if possible
  
• Be more competitive in your niche
  
• Build the value of your brand
  
• Establish new partnerships and relationships
  
• Increase turnover and improve profitability
  

When creating a new product or service it is going to take time and effort and possibly money to invest in either new products or new people to help bring it to life. You don’t want your product rejected, although this could certainly be a huge learning curve, but you need to take the right steps. Just like most products you are going to want to create what is known as a prototype. The first product that can be tested on the public before it goes into production. You need to take many things into consideration. Such as development and manufacturing costs? Without the prototype you could lose thousands on an unsuccessful product. After this you must try to maintain a balance between the costs and the capacity of the product in order to see a return. Once the product is in production it is the distribution costs which then must be evaluated. If you sell an item in your local area just to your small town, then you could look at keeping the costs down by selling locally. Finding a sales distribution company willing to sell your products to retailers is an option but this will incur further costs and depends on what your goals for the product are.  

Upgrading your entire business
Upgrading is a massive part of innovation. Improve your business technology to start seeing positive changes. Technology gives any SMEs the ability to connect with their customers via the internet. Small business owners can take advantage of this instant communication but if the tech isn’t up to scratch, you aren’t going to be seeing those changes. You want to see changes within your technology so that you can connect even quicker and be able to store information well. Improving technology is a great step for innovation. Getting new systems on your computer that serve you well and are quick paced, is fantastic. It assists with: 

• Speed, efficiency, and agility. 
  
• Storage and sharing.
  
• Mobility and remote communications. 
  
• Automation. 
  
• Communication.
  

This will be able to assist you with keeping on top of trends quicker. New computer systems and advanced security is really important when it comes to keeping your business safe too. The bigger your business grows, the more chance of having some type of attack. The more numbers and information relating to business and finance, the bigger the chance of someone trying to hack you. You could also look at new and improved telephone communication especially if you have a phone line that people call, or any type of helpline, a good fast system will keep customers happy and will make your productivity much more improved. Having a great and efficient Accounting System is also vital to keep on top of what you’re spending and how best to budget month by month. Innovation starts with you but it does take a little time to figure it all out. Don’t be despondent though. Have chats with your team and brainstorm ideas for the future. 

It’s time to get things on track. Improve your SEO, look at new ways to move forward, keep in communication and watch your business grow.