Innovation is a combination of ideas and action. It is hard work to bring a good idea to fruition. Not everyone is willing to embrace an innovative mindset and practices. Yet, that should be a priority for entrepreneurs. It is innovation thought, deeds, and achievements that give businesses competitive edge.
How easy is it for you to answer those three questions?
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that innovation is a periodic event, a process undertaken at an annual retreat or in response to a major change or a crisis such as Covid 19. Innovation is not an improvised program, event, or process. It is not a “What”.
Innovation is the “How”! It is a flow that is embodied in the vision of your business, and is discernible in everything you do.
Even if you work alone, you need to be purposeful in how you use innovation to move your business forward. Are you dedicating time every day, every week to innovation? If not, why not? What can you commit to do right now? Innovation is crucial enough that we cannot stress enough the importance of adjusting your timetable to ensure you are able to put effort into examining the changes going on and what that means in terms of opportunities, and also to work on your ideas to bring them to fruition.
Think of innovation as your entrepreneurial multi-purpose tool, one you are keen to use as often as possible. That tool makes you razor sharp on the type of processes you use and the events you plan, knowing how those two aspects of your business affect both your approach to innovation and ability to improve. It helps you gain competitive advantage and stay in tune to an ever-changing market to maintain that edge.
The good news for any entrepreneur is that the ability to think innovatively can be practiced so you become comfortable with your mind wandering and wondering in all kinds of directions beyond accepted norms and conventional wisdom.
Need a place to start? Find your innovative strengths with these suggestions:
Mindset is the lens through which you see and interpret the world. Since change is inevitable, as an entrepreneur you have to be conscious of the world around you, and be willing to adapt. An innovative mind-set helps you to gain creative insights by looking at things from a different perspective. It helps you to exploit new ideas, solve problems, improve efficiency and effectiveness, find new revenue opportunities, optimize existing practices or revamp strategies that keep you on the journey forward.
Innovative thinking is characterized by a growth mindset. When you have a growth mindset you believe that you can do hard things. You believe that basic qualities, attitudes, intelligence and abilities are things you continue to cultivate through learning, application, and experience. A growth mindset teaches you to be fascinated by emerging challenges, to be curious and willing to put in the effort to keep on learning. A growth mindset is cultivated through practice. As your mindset expands, it encompasses the mental skills required for all learning and for innovation.
More good news! You have probably already adopted a growth mindset to innovate yourself toward becoming an independent entrepreneur. In fact, you identify your entrepreneurial attributes and enhance them through your growth mindset.
There is lots of information stressing the need to put time and effort into innovation or how to construct a more innovative culture, but less is said about the skills and strengths that make innovators stand out from the crowd of entrepreneurs? Let's face it, it's not always easy to bring a good idea to fruition. It's not luck! So what does it take and can you learn to be more innovative?
The answer is a resounding yes! The core competencies demonstrated by innovators can be cultivated. To be skilled at innovation you can sharpen any core competencies that affect your ability to innovative. Once developed these competencies are yours for a lifetime.
Let's explore these skills and strengths:
Empathy: To create new and better ways of doing things, you need to first understand for whom you are innovating a product, service, or procedure. This requires empathy to understand the experiences of another person or group of people when you cannot immerse yourself in their lives.
Problem-finder: Innovators thrive on having problems to solve. If you want to be innovative, you need to look at questions first. All innovation starts from a question not an answer. The answer lies in your ability to move beyond the challenges and constraints. Brainstorming can be a Solution
Curiosity: Curious people ask questions, explore possibilities, and dive into quite unusual thinking to get answers. How can we make it better? What else could we do? What if? These are the questions you want to hear around your association. Tough questions get you to the root of a problem and figure out underlying motivations so you can get an innovative idea to the action stage. Learn more about Being Curious and Staying Curious
Opportunity-Focused: The best innovators see opportunities and direction where other people see dead-ends. It is tempting to fixate on one single option early in the process. The best innovators are able to stay open to exploring different possibilities before they close in on a selection. You have to be open to unexpected information or events, meaningful comments and how various feedback can used to improve any original idea. You want the ability to extract meaningful learning, adapt and implement what you learn to make an idea evolve in a meaningful way.
Action-Oriented/Pragmatic: Achieving practical results is fundamental to innovation. Being action-oriented or pragmatic allows you to shift your focus from intellectual thought to practical ideas and planning to building prototypes and running early experiments to prove fundamentals of a concept.
Intellectual Humility: An innovative mind-set includes the ability to be unassuming. As a leader you cannot expect to automatically have all the knowledge necessary to make good decisions, or the skills required to bring your idea market. Intellectual humility allows you to acknowledge the limits of your knowledge when new information is revealed or feedback is discouraging. It allows you to be open to new learning. In fact, you place a high value on learning and solutions over your need to be right. The best part is that intellectual humility opens up new avenues for you to develop alternative solutions.
Courage: Innovation is not easy. It requires courage to be vulnerable, accept change, ask tough questions of yourself or your organization, and venture into a new strategy or experience. It takes courage to create something and let the world judge your work. It takes courage to be a risk-taker and do something different rather than stick with conventions or the “tried-and-true” methods you have relied on in the past. It also takes courage to be humble in the face of new information or admitting the limits of your own knowledge. Tap into Your Courage
Observant: Innovation requires a sharp eye and vigilance to see and understand what is happening, like having active radar, that endlessly scans the environment for possibilities. The more observant you are the more sensitive you are to identifying uncertainties which helps you make better decisions. Stengthen your Powers of Observation
Connection-Diversity: In broad terms, innovation is about connecting thoughts to solve a problem and create value. Innovators are committed to diversity and understand it takes many different points of view to fully grasp the complexity of economic, technological and other challenges. Innovators cultivate diversity to strengthen their innovation projects because listening to and understanding people from a diverse network helps them zero in on the right answers and solutions.
Do you source good ideas from outside your immediate think group? Do you have the ability to talk to people of different age groups, social classes, or cultures? Do you seek insight and knowledge through customers, end users, competitors, universities, independent entrepreneurs, investors, inventors, scientists, and suppliers. Are you able to really listen to understand people who think radically different from you? Apart from what you learn through your immediate educational sources are you tapping into the diverse expertise to learn from organizations around the world who sharing their practices and ideas? Wisdom is all around you; you just have to be open to it. Sometimes the most valuable thing you get from your connections is not just an idea, but the inspiration or courage to try something new or stick with a project. Expand your Discovery Network
Agility: Nothing is laid out and set in stone. You need agility to a bend, pivot and change to accommodate challenges in the market, make decisions and move quickly, with minimal disruption to existing business. You can be hindered by sticking to conventional wisdom or being fixated on meetings to discuss possibilities or be nimble to get an idea off the drawing board and make it a tangible value-driven product or service.
Reflective: It is important to reflect on your processes. It informs understand of what worked? What didn’t? What could we do next time? If we started again, what would we do differently? What can we build upon? Through continuous reflection, you use your self-awareness, behaviours and interactions as a source of learning. Learning is the key word. Often, it is reflective thought that reveals new pieces of information that were potentially important for the project and could be the difference between good results and great results.
Resourceful/Multi-Capable: Innovators are incredibly competent at using what’s around them or acquiring new capabilities to help them reach their goals. If one path does not work, they try something else, often able to think on the fly and at significant speed. If you are a generalist (an entrepreneur that operates from a broad base of interests and learning environments, and also has acquired a diverse range of capabilities) that is an excellent attribute for an innovator because it makes you more adaptable. Being multi-capable gives you the readiness and ability to transfer skills and knowledge and apply them flexibly to situations you haven’t seen before. You are better able to match a strategy to a type of problem. Generalists are quite keen to experiment, ready to learning about things that are necessary to keep their projects going, and able to source the right talent and skills when necessary.
Resilience: Failure and unexpected outcomes go hand in hand with innovation. Resilience means you can adapt to adversity and will not be defeated by challenges. When priorities change, you do not get stressed out. Things simply do not always work on the first try, so you need mental resilience to do what is needed to take in the new information in negative feedback, accept it in a constructive way and remain operative. This also means being able to let go of an idea once it is proven unsuccessful and continuing to explore other solutions. Read more about Resilience to Power Through C hange and Flexibility is a Timeless Skill
As a small business owner
you should assess whether you are sourcing enough good ideas from outside your
immediate think group. The more ideas generated, the greater the chance of
finding innovative ways to combine them into something new.
Inspiration can strike when you least expect it, but that is rather an inefficient way to drive innovation and creativity. Want a do-it-yourself approach to decision-making and problem solving? Try one of these brainstorming techniques to develop your ideas.
Professionalism is what you do visibly that impresses and inspires others and what you do behind the scenes – integrity, self-regulation, conscientiousness – that allows you to fulfill your role to the best of your ability and gives you a sense of satisfaction and self-worth.
When you are overworked and under pressure, try these two super easy-to-implement strategies to fend off procrastination. They can be completed quickly and more importantly they work best to set the tone for an excellent day.
Kindness should extend to our colleagues and work family. In the workplace, kindness is a catalyst that helps to build trust, drives morale, improves well-being, engagement, and productivity. Kindness makes you feel good and that is a good way to spend your day.
As a professional, you want to get the job done – and done well. You do what is necessary to produce results that exceed expectations. You recognize whatever you do to keep advancing personally and professionally also helps your business to thrive.
