How To Ensure Your Business Remains Innovative As It Grows

As companies get larger, there is a tendency for them to lose some of the innovative edge and versatility that defined them as start-ups and young enterprises. Several factors common to larger firms contribute to this, including increased bureaucracy and more rigid, hierarchical command structures.

Accordingly, one of the challenges that growing businesses face involves keeping the company nimble, and ensuring that the workforce and leadership alike continue to adapt to technology and changing market conditions.

Encourage experimentation, with some margin for error.

All businesses strive to offer products and services that are commercially viable, and for larger firms in particular, a preoccupation with maximizing shareholder value can intensify those commercial pressures. Unfortunately, a drive for immediate windfalls can undermine more sophisticated forms of innovation that require time and capital investment to develop.

Major innovations cannot happen without experimentation, and experimentation is inherently risky. Many successful businesses have invested in products and technologies that never really took off. (Think of Google Glass, or QR codes, for example.) To genuinely innovate, managers must be willing to take risks on novel concepts that may not always pan out.

Consider the potential, and not just past achievements, of job candidates.

In applying for a position at your company, job candidates will typically emphasize their past experience and achievements that are relevant to the role—and well they should. But in looking to hire and promote, don’t get so fixated on the past successes of a candidate that you overlook the potential of applicants to grow as individuals and expand their skill sets.

In the recruitment stage, in interviews, and in personality surveys, try to incorporate questions that will reveal whether a candidate is curious, open to new approaches to old problems, and believes in h/er own potential to cultivate new skills.

One question that may reveal all of these attributes is: “What new skills or knowledge have you gained in the past year, and what did the learning process involve?” Alternatively, the common interview question “Do you have any questions for me?” can help bring out the curiosity, level of engagement, and preparedness of the candidate. Consider giving job candidates an assignment that will test their skills and approach to problem-solving.

Personal accountability matters.

One of the most important attributes of strong leaders is a capacity to assume responsibility when something goes wrong. In other words, they believe the locus of control is primarily internal rather than external. These are the types of individuals you should seek to hire and promote.

Personal responsibility is important from the perspective of organizational growth. Individuals who are willing to assume primary responsibility for their own shortcomings are more likely to learn from them and modify their approach. By contrast, those who convince themselves that their errors are entirely attributable to bad luck or circumstances beyond their control risk missing the lesson.

Reflect on your performance.

It’s not enough to merely work harder or put in longer hours when your business faces a challenge: you need a plan to help steer your efforts in a productive direction. Real learning requires not only hard work and persistence, but also active mental engagement.

One practice that can help is daily reflection—over the course of the work day, what did you do well, what would you have done differently if offered a second chance, and where do you see room for improvement? To facilitate this kind of reflection, you can encourage staff to keep a work journal, and set aside time (10-15 minutes of the workday) for entry-writing.

Fostering Team Creativity

Many extraordinary innovations are the product not of individual strokes of genius, but rather cooperation among highly skilled individuals working toward a common goal. As technology grows more advanced and intricate, and groundbreaking innovation requires an increasingly sophisticated skill set, the power of co-creation is only becoming more essential. Exemplary creative teams often benefit from a diversity of skills, passions, and expertise, and a work environment that allows each member of the collective to shine.

A leadership style conducive to innovation.

As management scholar and Harvard business professor Linda Hill explained in a 2014 TED talk, a top-down style of leadership is seldom consistent with the freedom of thought and expression that enables creative minds to flourish. But a total absence of structure isn’t helpful either.

Hill offers several examples of firms with work environments conducive to collective innovation, including computer animation studio Pixar, and search engine giant Google. Hill and her research partners have concluded that managers at these firms embrace an unconventional style of leadership—one which conceives of the boss as a connector and social architect, rather than a commander-in-chief. Or as Hill says, “Our role as leaders is to set the stage, not to perform on it.”

Development teams at Pixar typically include around 250 members, who spend between four and five years composing a single film. Once the team has established its overall objective (to produce an animated movie with a particular storyline, characters, and themes), the process and details are somewhat flexible. Importantly, effective managers of creative projects do not presume that their own vision is superior in all respects to the potentially conflicting ideas and expertise of the other team members. In any project of this magnitude, unanticipated challenges are also likely to arise, which may require improvised solutions.

The physical design and layout of the workplace is a crucial factor as well. The members of a creative team must have enough isolated space to pursue their own trains of thought, but enough common space to allow discussion and engagement. Instead of consensus and conformity, a manager who aims to promote creativity shouldn’t be afraid to allow constructive debate, and even constructive conflict. The leader’s role in these situations is to moderate the discussion, rather than attempt to influence the entire team toward a single point of view.

Creative abrasion, agility, and resolution.

Hill believes many organizations that display high levels of team creativity have mastered three over-arching abilities.

•  Creative abrasion is the frequent meeting of minds in the workspace, which may sometimes culminate in confrontation. The role of a manager at this stage is to amplify voices that might not otherwise receive a fair hearing, and engender a respectful marketplace of ideas.

•  Creative agility is the testing of ideas and concepts on a small scale in order to ascertain possible solutions to problems. The immediate goal of this is twofold—to examine the viability of those ideas in practice, and refine them by identifying practical shortcomings. This is an experimental, trial-and-error process, and team members should understand it as such.

•  Creative resolution is the decision-making process by which the members of a creative team collectively determine a path forward. This may require integration of conflictual or divergent ideas. However, Hill believes managers should discourage team members from “going along to get along”, accepting compromises they find unsatisfactory.

In sum, successful leaders of creative teams don’t necessarily “lead” in the conventional sense; instead, they aim to provide fertile soil for the emergence of ingenuity.

Your Work Environment Shapes Your Mentality

Which is better: a tidy, organized workplace, or a cluttered, messy one?

For most people, the answer to this question seems glaringly obvious. Clearly organization trumps slovenliness and disarray in the workplace.

Or does it?

In reality, the answer may be more ambiguous than you’d expect. A 2013 study led by psychologist Kathleen Vohs suggests that clutter and organization both have pros and cons; the former tends to promote creativity, while the latter is more conducive to observing social and ethical norms, following procedures, and getting mundane tasks done.

In other words, the choice of which of those two states (order or disorder) to favour largely depends on what you hope to achieve, and what sort of work you happen to be doing. (Naturally, personality and individual preferences are significant factors too.)

Messiness can promote thinking outside the box

Innovation, by definition, involves a break from convention, and many of the most successful start-ups in history owe their genesis to a moment’s inspiration. Nowadays, every business owner is seeking a competitive edge, and the ability to come up with fresh and useful ideas certainly helps. Writing in the New York Times, Vohs described the details of the study she and her colleagues undertook, and some of its practical implications for managers and entrepreneurs hoping to spur ingenuity.

One component of Vohs et al.’s study involved two groups of research participants, half of whom were deployed to a tidy room, and the other half, to a disheveled one. All of the subjects were assigned the task of devising innovative uses for ping-pong balls, and the ideas they came up with were rated on both quantity and quality. (Unoriginal ideas, like using the balls to play beer-pong, received a low creativity rating.)

Both groups produced the same number of ideas. But the novelties emanating from the messy room were significantly more creative, and included using ping-pong balls as floor protectors for furniture, and to make ice trays. Comparable results, indicating a correlation between disorganization and creativity, have been found in subsequent studies.

           

The take-away is clear: a bit of messiness (within reasonable limits, of course) can foster fresh approaches to everyday problems, exactly the sort of thinking that enables small businesses to address unmet needs in the marketplace, and thrive as a result.

But of course, disarray is not without some drawbacks.

Tidiness correlated with generosity, and adherence to convention

While thinking outside the box is well and good, there are also plenty of occasions in life, including in professional environments, where it pays to recognize what’s working, and stick with it. Why re-invent the wheel?

In another component of their study, Vohs and her colleagues found that research participants who had been exposed to tidy environments tended to be more generous in their donations to a charity that supplied books and toys to disadvantaged children. When offered a choice of snacks between a chocolate bar and an apple, participants from the more orderly environment also tended to favour the healthier option.

One needn’t perform a scientific study in order to think of some other advantages that stem from organization. By maintaining order around your desk, you can avoid wasting time hunting around for things, and won’t become sidetracked as easily. Having a clear process in mind for the tasks ahead, and all the tools and materials that you need on hand, can save you mental and physical energy. This is crucial if your workload is heavy, and especially if it involves run-of-the-mill administrative duties.

But as Vohs et al.’s research indicates, it is hazardous to presume that disorganization in the workplace is a liability. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be an asset.

Dealing With Disruptive Innovation

 Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen is renowned for formulating the theory of disruptive innovation—which describes novel products or services with the potential to revolutionize an industry, and displace incumbents from their market position. In his 1996 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Christensen reflects on corporate decisions that, though ostensibly rational, failed to anticipate and profitably respond to make-or-break technological advances. He draws a distinction between sustaining innovations, which enhance the quality or effectiveness of an existing product, and disruptive innovations: technological developments which can displace a popular product altogether, especially by offering a more affordable, more accessible, or more versatile alternative.

For example, when personal computers (a potentially disruptive technology) first appeared on the consumer market, it was not entirely clear that they would supplant typewriters as the principal word-processing tool in our society. Thus, typewriter manufacturers faced a pivotal choice: to stick to their area of expertise and strive to create better and more reliable typewriters, or to shift their business model dramatically. Some firms—notably the American conglomerate Smith Corona—opted for the former, and found themselves manufacturing machines of excellent quality, the demand for which rapidly dried up.

While there are no sure things in business (after all, the penchant for innovation and dynamism is one of the key selling points of a market capitalist economy), there are some pragmatic steps companies can take to avoid being “disrupted”:

Know—and expand—your market. Maintaining relationships with customers/clients while striving to attract new (and especially less affluent) ones is key. Engage with your clientele, welcome their feedback, keep tabs on their wants and values, and consider ways to serve them better. Customer loyalty—the result of a reputation for professionalism, ethical practices, and high-quality products—can help keep your enterprise afloat as you integrate new technologies into your business model.

What are your competitors doing? Although spying on rivals is an obvious faux pas, you can derive plenty of information by building an amicable rapport with competitors in your industry. Is there a technique or technology they might introduce that would keep you up at night?

Apprise yourself of trends and innovations. The upside of innovation is that it helps us solve problems, spares us effort, and tends to build on itself. Stay abreast of the latest trends, both within your industry and in society at large. Are there any new ideas or technologies you can make use of? What aspects of your operation would you like to run more smoothly? (Don’t overlook the possibility that you could devise your own innovative solution!)

Harness the innovativeness of a start-up while running an established firm. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christenson refers to discovery-driven planning, which involves real-time strategic adjustments, learning-by-doing, and a bit of trial-and-error. Accordingly, firms and their managers should be willing to take calculated risks, adopting innovations that may not work out perfectly on the first attempt.

Bear in mind that there is no such thing as a monopoly on good ideas. Start-up firms tend to be nimble and creative not only because their founders may feel they have nothing to lose, but also because there is little hierarchy between workers and managers, or entrenched operational protocols, to obstruct the free flow of ideas. Don’t be afraid to ask employees what they think, and encourage equal-opportunity communication in the workplace.

Intimidating though it may seem, disruptive innovation needn’t be a threat to your business. With the right approach and attitude, you will be equipped to not only respond to potentially disruptive innovations, but to place yourself at the leading edge.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint – But You Gotta Go Really Fast!

When deciding to start a business it is always important to keep the long play in mind. It’s okay to make sacrifices in the early going with the expectation that it will pay off in the long run. It’s fine to keep business at a slow, steady, and manageable pace in order to achieve a level of comfort and sustainability. And, there’s nothing wrong with finding your stride and establishing a work flow that’s right for you. However, it’s never time to allow complacency to settle in because allowing yourself to fall behind means you will inevitably get left behind. Below are few key ideas to keep in mind order for your business to keep pace and make the right strides from start to finish.

Innovate.

No matter how cutting edge you think you are, the next big thing is right around the corner – it’s just a simple fact with the current state of technology. The moment a new technology is released, companies are on the move making refinements and developing their own patents in order to stay in the race and get a piece of the pie. It’s not always necessary to be at the vanguard of innovation, but it’s essential that you keep a pulse on whatever the latest upgrades are and keep your own systems up to date. Always make a point to reevaluate the state of your company’s level of innovation every quarter – yes, things change just that quickly.

Ask for feedback, and respond to criticism.

No matter what service, or product, your company provides, the needs of your clients will change from one day to the next and it’s essential that you stay on top of what those needs are. At the end of the day it is your job to provide them with what they are looking for, not what you think they should want. Being sensitive to customer needs is the cornerstone to profitability because it is customer needs that, in fact, drive innovation. Also, it’s essential that you never become bitter towards negative criticisms to your product or service. As great as it feels to receive a pat on the back once in a while, that’s not necessarily how we grow. Every negative criticism represents an insight into the potential flaws with your service or product and what may need tweaking or overhauling. Criticism isn’t so much an indictment of your abilities as it is an opportunity to step up and prove what you’re capable of.

Embrace change.

Once upon a time people graduated from college, got a job, and stayed right there until they retired. It’s well understood that nowadays college graduates should prepare to have several careers before they decide to call in their pensions. In the previous paradigm a layoff would have been calamitous, but today it’s almost so common that the phrase “I’m between jobs right now” has almost become cliché. Keeping everything in a constant state of flux should be the only permanent aspect of your life and business. It prepares you for every eventuality because if you’ve been keeping up you likely saw the changes coming a long time ago.

Have no fear.

 Anyone unfamiliar with the term “self-sabotage” needs to go look it up, because all too often we are the biggest obstacle we need to overcome. Whether it’s fear or apathy, very often we become limited by what we feel we deserve and no one is going to just pay us because we think we’re cool. It’s fine to speak soft, but paramount to be assertive enough to do what needs to be done. It’s not enough to just put one foot in front of the other. In order to make real strides you have to pound the pavement and you need to have a talk with yourself and not let yourself get in the way of you achieving your dreams. 

The Google Patent Search Tool - Does This Affect Your Intellectual Property?

A patent is all about protection for your intellectual property. The United States provides patents to give inventors the right “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling their invention throughout the United States or importing their invention into the United States.”

Every country can grant a patent which would govern that property in that country. It is conceivable that a patent granted in the U.S. or Canada doesn’t necessarily offer protection against infringement in a country like China or Russia.

Still, it is advisable for a business that has a piece of intellectual property to have it patented in as many countries as possible.

Google has created a patent search which is becoming a huge asset to many businesses. When you consider that there are 8 million approved patents and 3 million pending patent applications in the U.S. alone then you can see the need for a search engine. Now Google has put that database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office online for easy access. How can this help you protect your intellectual property? Consider these benefits:

Clearing the Field

The first obvious benefit of a Google patent search is to see if somebody beat you to the punch. In other words, has your brilliant idea already been developed? This is a search that really should be conducted once the plans for an item are ready to go to the prototype stage. If you find that your idea has been patented you’ll either have to rethink it entirely or scrape the project. Better to learn that in the early stages of development.

Borrowing Innovations

Suppose you’re in the kind of business that needs to create a machine to make the perfect widget. You’re really selling the widget but it has to be mass produced to be cost effective. That special machine you design to make the widget could be patented. However, you might find that another business has a similar machine you can adapt. There’s no need to go down the expensive patent review process when you can license the right to use that technology from the original patent holder. Remember, you want to get to your “widget” and the most affordable and stress free path to that goal is the way to go.

Getting Inspiration

There aren’t a lot of secrets when it comes to granting a patent. If you’re working through a challenging design you might do a patent search for similar products to see how other inventors overcame their hurdles. Who knows? You could be inspired to take your idea in a new direction that no one has thought of.

Inventor 411

It could be that you’re so impressed with a particular product or piece of intellectual property that you want to know more about the originator of that idea. The patent search will let you trace the inventor and find out what other ideas they’ve worked on.

What Is The Biggest Threat To Your Creativity?

 

The biggest threat to your creativity could be staring you right in the face. The mere fact that you might be researching this topic means you’re stuck! It might be that the creative block hindering your productivity could come down to your attitude. If you consider the very act of “being creative” as a chore or something you dread, then you’re setting up a pattern of self-defeat before you even begin. That’s not being productive or creative. Here are some other things to consider that will help spark your creative flow:

Change Your Perspective

Try sitting in your guest chair for an hour while doing your work. Swap out the photos or art work hanging on your wall. Sometimes changing perspective can be enough to spark a creative idea. Even the smallest change can make a difference. If you have the chance to grab your laptop and head outdoors to the nearest java joint, go for it. There’s no telling what you might run into or meet up with that could help you rethink a problem and come up with a creative solution.

Change Your Chair

If you’re spending eight hours in an uncomfortable chair it’s no wonder you can’t be creative. Constantly adjusting your posture to find the perfect position is a distraction. That distraction can set off a chain reaction. If your chair is uncomfortable then it’s too hot or too cold in the office. Your shoes are too tight. You don’t like what you’re wearing. It goes on and on. Stop those kinds of distractions in their track and start by being comfortable in your chair. By the same token, don’t always sit in the same chair during conference room meetings. Mix it up and see what happens.

Change Your Office Space

There might be an unused area in your office that would make a great “think tank.” Bring in a couple of comfy sofas and chairs and let this be a break space that gives you and your coworkers a chance to get out and move around. This could also be a great place to share idea and get feedback.

Take a Break

We’re not talking about going for a cup of coffee or slice of birthday cake. Instead, think of ways to take an inspiration break. Is there a piece of music that always puts you in a good frame of mind? Is there a favorite writer who always gets you thinking? Load up some quotes or your favorite book in your iPad. Then schedule time to put your work aside and look from inspiration from those sources.

Write Everything Down

The only bad idea is no idea. You sometimes have to get through the dozen clunkers before finding that gem. That’s why when you’re brainstorming you should write everything down. Doesn’t matter if it’s a pad, a dry erase board or even a digital recorder - get it on record for future consideration.