Building Your Business on Innovation

Everyone starts their business with a winning idea, that one core competency which distinguishes their service or product apart from everyone else. Wouldn’t you like to install a system in your business which perpetuates that winning idea and makes growth and profitability easier to achieve? When we start a business we have an energy that is generated from this advantage we have developed; our innovation fuel tank is on full. As time goes by, however, it is very easy to find yourself unable to sustain the rate of growth and match the energy levels you experienced in those fertile days of the launch. Often business owners chalk this up to “maturity” and sometimes falsely celebrate the “normalcy” that sets in. My experience has been that such feelings are the first warning sign of a business plan going bad. 

Innovation is often misunderstood; many times it is mistaken for invention. The two are actually quite different concepts. I think of invention as taking a green field and developing a totally new concept in the world. I am involved in a high-tech electronics firm devoted to medical products. This company developed a new implantable cochlear device, a permanent hearing aid. This was an invention. There was a huge amount of human and physical capital, not to mention research dollars, invested before a single device is even designed, let alone produced and tested. Innovation is looking around you for the unrealized potential of ideas, products and methods, which, when applied, have the appearance and many of the characteristics of an invention. Of course, much of the development time and hard work are already performed and all you are left with is the task of making relevant changes to apply to your business. I don’t mean to underestimate the hard work innovation can require. There are a whole new set of skills which need to be developed to become an innovation opportunist. An innovation opportunist embraces the mission of setting new directions for their operations and their market segment.  The job, however, is much different than the corporate think tank or a structure of an engineering firm dedicated to product development. To the opportunist, the entire world is fair game; he/she is in a giant scavenger hunt for useful tools.

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