How To Make Your Company More Innovative & Creative

Customer Experience MagicBrief: The best brands in the world don’t thrive simply because of their great product or service. They thrive because of an unrelenting passion and focus on customer experience.

Whether it’s a game-changing product or a brand-new service that no one dreamed of until everyone needed it, innovation may provide every small business with a competitive advantage. Coming up with fresh ideas, on the other hand, is easier said than done.

Throughout Customer Experience Magic, creative Duncan Wardle speaker will demonstrate to your audience what can happen when your business shifts from a product-centric to a customer-centric perspective, as well as the actions required to get there. He’ll share a famous real-world example from his time as The Walt Disney Company’s Head of Innovation and Creativity when they faced challenges brought on not by direct competitors, but by retail behemoth Amazon, whose lightning-fast fulfilment and delivery systems drastically changed how long consumers were willing to wait to be served.

What steps can you take to make your company more innovative? Try out these suggestions by several of our well-known innovation speakers.

Involve everyone in the firm.

Marketers, graphic designers, and other “creative” people are accustomed to being asked to innovate, which can result in stale ideas. Don’t confine innovation to “usual suspects” or important executives. Bringing various departments together fosters creativity by allowing individuals to interact with others they would not ordinarily interact with. Some of the most creative ideas may come from your frontline employees—after all, they are the ones that interact with your clients, product, or service on a daily basis.

Begin with your clients.

Don’t innovate for the sake of innovating. If you come up with what you believe is a brilliant concept for a better widget without ever thinking if clients want a better widget, you can become pretty distracted. To identify client pain areas and dissatisfactions, do customer surveys, focus groups, and market research. Listen to what customers are saying on social media to learn more about what they want. Determine what gaps in their life your goods or services may cover, or how you could innovate to better serve clients.

Capture all of your thoughts.

Make a note of the outcomes of your brainstorming sessions and other efforts at innovation. This may be accomplished by having everyone write on Post-It notes or whiteboards, having someone videotape each session, taking images of whiteboards and notes with cellphones and uploading them, or simply having someone take notes (although if your session is very freewheeling, this might result in a lot of missed data). You never know when the “great idea” may emerge from something you didn’t notice at the time, so being able to go back and evaluate ideas is quite useful.

Choose your fights wisely.

You may come up with a dozen fantastic ideas, but can you afford to work on all of them at the same time? If you’re like the majority of small company entrepreneurs, you probably don’t. Once you’ve generated some ideas, assign them to individuals who will evaluate their practicality, cost, and potential benefits. Don’t restrict yourself to one innovation—trying several increases your chances of success—but choose your emphasis intelligently. Put part of your efforts toward the low-hanging fruit, which will pay off right away, and some toward the big-picture aim, which may take some time to reach the market.

Assign ownership and then execute.

People are delighted about fresh ideas, but without a champion to see them through, they typically wither on the vine once the initial euphoria of the brainstorming session fades. Make sure that someone is in charge of preparing the next steps and following through on action items for each invention. Assess your progress toward innovation objectives on a regular basis to determine whether they are worthwhile to pursue or if it is time to call it quits.

 

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