5 Tips on Managing Innovation

Innovation is the lifeblood of success. Your small business may sell things or perform services. It may sell things or services across a counter or online. Your service may be soft and virtual or tangible and rough edged. You may be a contractor or chiropractor, plumber or electrician, insurance agent or CPA, or exist only on the web.

However, innovation put you into business, and you need to continue that edge to stay ahead.

1. Build innovation into your hiring process. List innovation among the advertised experiences and abilities. In job interviews, ask candidates to describe innovative behavior and request examples of how they have been innovative at previous employers.
2. Define what innovation means to you and offer examples of where it has impacted your business performance. Make the definition part of signage, policy, communication, newsletters, and employee relations. Include it in job descriptions as a concrete behavior.
3. Integrate the language of innovation into business mission, core values, core competencies, and marketing.
4. Encourage innovation with more employee accountability and projects that are more engaging. Create your workspaces to encourage collaboration and creative socialization.
5. Structure formal processes that reward innovation. Innovation needs to fail without punishment, but everyone needs to know where the process goes next, who reviews it, and what approval will mean in success metrics.

Managing innovation costs money. It is not something you simply start to do mid-stream. You need to anticipate how you will respect and encourage innovation well before you start the process. The structure and rewards must be budgeted. You’ll want to anticipate the shelf life of the innovative ideas that started the business in the first place. Ideally, have the structure and process in place before your first innovation runs its course.

If you do not, you risk losing your unique selling proposition. Without innovation, you could be overrun by your competitors that copy, co-opt, or deconstruct your first ideas.