In business, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you cannot ignore innovation. Wherever your business is in its journey, you absolutely need to make room for innovation in your budget.
To support innovation, it’s a good ideal to consider where your company currently stands in its journey, and prioritise innovation accordingly.
Listed below are some of the key stages your business could be at:
1. Start-up stage
As a start-up, you need to take advantage of every funding opportunity you can. From your own personal funds right through to angel investors, crowdfunding and crowdlending, there are many opportunities for start-ups to raise funds.
Another source of cash to fund your innovation efforts is government funding, whether in the form of grants or government ground. Be confident, taking the time to apply for a grant or pursue a venture capital lead – you never know who may be interested in backing your brightest ideas. Wherever the source of the funds, these are the stepping stones to innovation.
2. Growth Stage
At the growth stage, you’ll need to structure your organisation in an innovation-friendly way. Doing this is one of the best ways to keep your focus on innovation. As you scale, always keep your sights on innovation in order to get to your next milestone. Keep funding flowing by maintaining a level of urgency, even if you’re feeling stable and seeing a profit each month. Uber adopted this strategy by building urgency right into the most local level of the company. This strategy enabled Uber to create new service lines and seize new opportunities versus a top-down approach.
3. Established stage
At the established stage it’s time to pursue digital transformation and innovation labs.
Companies such as Visa, Citi and Fidelity now use innovation labs to drive innovation. Such labs are helping these businesses to find new ways to do so many incredible things, such as prevent fraud and enable new mobile payment systems. Innovation labs have helped multiple retailers also help multiple retailers keep up with the huge changes affecting the industry.
Read more here:
The 6 Stages of Digital Transformation
How to Drive your Digital Transformation with AI-Powered Search
If you want your business to thrive, you need to innovate. No matter which stage of the business journey you’re at, you have the tools to successfully innovate – it’s just a case of whether or not you use them.
Contact 8 Ways Media today to find out how to grow your business and reach heightened levels of success!
Related articles.
