Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. As business owner, it’s important think about how to create innovative products and services. Doing so will keep you at the forefront of your area and assure continued patronage. The following contributed post is entitled, Great Ways to Innovate in Business.
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When you are a small business owner, then being able to continuously innovate is something that is not easy. But if you don’t keep thinking of new ways to do things, then it can lead to diminishing results, for sure. So think about how and why you find it hard to innovate. Plus, you then need to do it over and over again, which is where the problems can lead to. So how can you make sure that you’re able to repeatedly bring new things into your business, as well as new products and services, that are going to help your customers in new ways? This kind of continuous innovation isn’t something that is easy, and it isn’t something that you can forget about. Quite simply, your business can be impacted if you don’t change and progress how you do things. So try innovating how you innovate, by trying out some of these ideas.
● Copying someone else’s idea isn’t as bad as it sounds. Simply, one of the best ways to innovate is to look at how someone has already done something, and then find a way for it to work for your business. For example, Airbnb and Uber are both businesses that have done really well recently, but they weren’t exactly reinventing the wheel when it comes to a business idea. They took something that worked and just found ways to make it better.
● Asking customers is another thing that you can do if you want to know exactly what they want. You could send out a survey to them, ask them in-store or on social media. But if you’re after some incremental innovations, then this can give you a good indicator of where to go with things. Usually, things from customers will be around how to make something cheaper, or how to make a product simpler to use. So ask them, listen to them, and make steps to change.
● Adapting a product to give it a new use is another way that you could innovate for your business and change how things are done. For example, if you click here then you will find that there are many ways to use certain products; you just need to find out why it will be of use to your business and how it can be used differently. You could quite easily find an entirely different application for an already existing product.
● Is going back in time, something that can make a difference and help? If you look back at different methods and services that have been used in your industry sector a while ago but hasn’t been used since, you could get some idea of how to refresh things or bring things back. Can you do something to bring something back but in a new and updated form? For example, it has been reported that the concept of Speed Dating was a relaunch of a Victorian dance format where, where people had cards with different appointments on for the night.
