How To Grow Your Business With Innovation

By Author: Sarah Ryan
Total Articles: 45
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To grow and survive in a competitive market is challenging. Businesses need to generate fresh ideas in order to build new markets.

Research indicates that most new ideas in business come from three sources:
- the staff
- company networks and
- customers.

Think about your company’s situation. Do ideas get lost ideas in day-to-day operations? Does your company have a formal customer feedback process? Do staff ideas get lost in emails and staff meetings?
As well, management often do not know how to assess which ideas they should implement.

You need a System
To cost-effectively assess and commercialise ideas within your workplace you first require a system to capture those ideas.

You need to assess the ideas as to whether they are:
- incremental (refer back to line management),
- strategic (consider licensing out or in-house development) or
- game-changing (spin-off).

Setting up an In-House Innovation Process
An in-house innovation process needs to be simple and easy to manage and incorporate these elements:
- Determine the rules/strategic ...
... objective of an innovation program
- Invite ideas (promote throughout the business networks and staff)
- Collect ideas (simple one-page submission)
- Assessment(1-10 using key company indicators)
- Execute:
1. Pilot (small amount of resources and team to develop)
2.Venture (commit more resources and staff)

People Strategy
An innovation program is best for businesses that want to grow within a market. It is in effect, a people strategy.

So what makes staff want to participate? It might be time to work on the idea (Google does this), or an award-system( trophy – Atlassian has this), or a monetary incentive. One company offered any team that created an idea into a business would attract 25% of net profits of the new idea income for 2 years.

A company must protect itself however with a simple agreement that outlines rights –that states the business owns all the intellectual property created.

Fed Ex Days
One award-winning company in Australia, Atlassian has an excellent model called ‘Fed Ex’ days. Quarterly, staff get 24 hours to produce a one-page outline of their idea. At 3pm the next day they pitch their idea to senior management and staff. Their ideas are voted on. One or two ideas get the green light for piloting.

These days innovation is not a luxury. It is about continuous improvement and keeping your company relevant. It is also about retaining staff and creating a dynamic workplace.

Dan Liszka is the CEO of Alchemy Equities, a business innovation consultancy firm which specialises in delivering in-house innovation programs to small and medium enterprises, as well as equity capital raising. Alchemy is contracted by the state government to deliver the NSW Innovation Advisory Service and has recently conducted workshops nationally titled Capturing Innovation in the Workplace funded by the federal government’s Enterprise Connect program.
For more information on Innovative Business Technology, Innovative Small Business Ideas and Innovative Small Businesses. Please visit: http://www.ausinvent.com/