Focus on Innovation

Change is a part of any business. But there’s a difference between change and innovation. Innovation is what separates you from the competition. Simply put, most companies fail at continuous innovation. Ultimately, that failure puts many companies out of business. The key is to understand how incremental innovation- as opposed to huge change- can benefit your company.

Innovation doesn’t have to be ground-breaking- in fact, for most businesses, trying to achieve big innovation can be destructive. But consistent, ongoing innovation can change your business for the better.

While we tend to think in terms of radical when we discuss innovation, it doesn’t need to be. It can simply be an incremental innovation extending a product you already offer, like a new color M&M or expanding the capacity of an MP3 player. Or it could be focusing inwardly on changes that help you take out costs or perform tasks more quickly or less expensively. It can be an adaptive innovation like making your company easier to do business with, like making it easier to shop with your company online.

Remember, as a small business owner- you can’t be good at everything. Focusing innovation efforts into the areas in which you have skills is likely the most benefit. Figure out what your organization is good at and focus on the things that create value for others- find the sweet spot where others aren’t playing yet. There are many different strategies for how you innovate to handle the things that don’t fall into the sweet spot; outsource, get rid of low-value things or even learn to improve on your abilities in a given area.

Brad Harmon is the President at a leading financing company, First Star Capital (http://www.firststarcapital.com/ ). Brad is a frequent contributor to online publications and newsletters, and is the author of this blog on commercial financing topics.