Running a small business takes a lot of effort. One figure frequently mentioned is that 80% of small businesses ultimately fail. Not surprisingly —when you run a small business, you’re responsible for the entire operation. Plus you have to carve out a space for your product or service in a crowded marketplace.
Part of your success depends on how you differentiate your company from the competition. New ideas and innovation are critical elements to running your business, its long term success and survival. You’ll stand a much better chance by avoiding some of these common innovation mistakes.
Looking at Innovation as a “Quick Fix”
Innovation can’t be something your company occasionally allocates resources to. It needs to be part of your company’s identity. Designing a specific vision of your company’s goals and a road map for how you’ll achieve those is a start. Then you need to describe to your team why innovation is important and how it will be part of day-to-day operations. Encourage collaboration of teams with diverse skill sets and multiple departments. And make sure that you reward behaviors associated with innovation to be the norm.
Identifying Problems Incorrectly
At the core of innovation is providing solutions to problems. However, this won’t work if you haven’t identified what the problems are in the first place. Work with your team to define and describe a discrete number of problems. Once you have prioritized those problems, you can go about finding ways to address them. Focusing on too many problems will mean that none of them get solved, especially in a business with limited staff and resources.
Discouraging Risk-Taking
The fact is that innovation goes hand in hand with failure. Most new ideas aren’t going to work out in the long term. That’s the reality of business—innovation comes at a cost. So when employees devise solutions that lose the company money or pitch ideas that go against company values, you can’t punish them for it. By doing so, you’re sending the message to the whole team that you value the same old status quo. Similarly, if you don’t give your team the resources to test out new ideas, you’re showing that innovation isn’t a priority or that their input isn’t really valued.
Missing out on Idea Opportunities from Stakeholders
Simply telling employees to generate ideas isn’t enough. First, you need to give them to do so. Otherwise, it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day responsibilities. Then you need to put systems in place to evaluate and enact those ideas. This could be as simple as having criteria by which to evaluate ideas or you could devote an entire department to this endeavor. This links ideas to innovation and encourages your stakeholders to be part of the success of your business.
It’s easy to neglect innovation in favor of putting out fires. But no matter the size of your business, you need to find ways to maintain a competitive advantage and impress customers. Generating and implementing innovative ideas is something every successful company does.
Accounting 360 Solutions offers small business assistance on everything from financial planning to marketing. Call us today to set up an appointment and begin discussing how we can help your company manage innovation to ensure long term success and profitability.
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