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All good entrepreneurs should be on the lookout for ways to innovate their operation, and go above and beyond the standards of their industry. For business owners in many sectors, a strong emphasis on innovation is absolutely essential to their company’s continued success. Obviously, pushing your business to the forefront of its niche isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but there are many ways you can encourage a stronger culture of innovation in your business. Here are just a few you may want to try…
Don’t Be Afraid of Mistakes
We all know from an early age that mistakes are a bad thing. When we become business owners, we go to great lengths to avoid slip-ups at all costs, playing it safe as much as possible. This is understandable, but it can certainly be a bad thing when you’re trying to make the company more innovative. Try to work on removing the fear of mistakes from your company culture. Obviously, this is a fine balancing act, as you don’t want to encourage reckless behaviour that could lead to a major catastrophe. However, you should be prompting all your employees to stretch their abilities, and getting them out of their comfort zones. This is always going to be a case of trial and error, and new approaches to old tasks are bound to lead to at least some mistakes. When these come up, analyse the thinking behind the way the employee acted, where they went wrong, and figure out how this can be avoided in the future. Remember, don’t be too judgemental or draconian! Removing the fear of making mistakes in your company will allow you to foster a more innovative and creative culture.
Encourage Fresh Ideas
The next time you have a large team meeting, ask everyone directly to come up with ideas about how they can improve their work. Have each employee come forward with at least one way they can make themselves even 1% better at their job, or an aspect of their job, and enhance the way it ultimately contributes to the business’s overarching goals. Whether it’s a simple way of minimising distractions at their desk or the suggestion of sourcing a new piece of technology for more complex procedures like measuring irrigation flow, there are all manner of possibilities which you’ll be able to draw from just by talking to your employees. Obviously, some people are going to be faster to stick their hands up and offer fresh, innovative ideas than others. However, the more you ask for these new approaches to work, the faster you’ll shift towards an inherent culture of innovation and progress.
Decide What to Start, Stop, and Leave Alone
Every now and then, when you’re convening with management and any other higher-ups at your company, ask each one about the things that they’d start doing, stop doing, and leave alone if they were the CEO. You should also go fishing for ideas as to what the best opportunities are for the company, and what kind of threats need to be tackled and mitigated. When you ask these kinds of questions, the answers can often highlight a range of innovative ideas that you’ve managed to overlook. If the company’s small enough, you can even extend this to the bulk of the workforce through a mass email or some other forum. As businesses grow, it’s fairly common for the upper echelons to become disconnected from the base processes that make the business tick. Your “front-line” employees, on the other hand, have an intimate, practical understanding of the day to day tasks that keep your business afloat.
Set a Schedule
You might find all these ideas appealing, but there may be various constraints on your company’s time that mean you simply can’t fit them in whenever you want. Innovation requires the risk of mistakes, but you may be in a position where the smallest slip-up could set you back by a year. If this is the case, you can help along your drive towards a more innovative culture by putting it into a schedule. Set aside a specific time slot in the week, even if it’s only quarter of an hour, that you’ll devote entirely to innovation. In the first week, you could scour some industry journals for technology news. In the second, you could discuss some emerging piece of technology with one of your close advisers. In the third, you could talk to accounts and come up with projections as to how this new tech could help profits. There’s always room for innovation, you just have to find it!
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