There's nothing complicated about innovation. All you need is a structure to get started with. And hopefully I've shown you that in this course you can and you should look at innovation in all aspects of your business. As we've seen in this course, you should be looking at your products and markets, your business processes, your business model, and your workplace practices. All of these will be fruitful areas for innovation. My closing thoughts, then, well, you should certainly start your innovation efforts now.
Innovation is going to be vital for the survival of your organization. markets and business practices are changing rapidly. So you need to put a small team together and start to think about what you can do to promote innovation in your organization. Analyze your products and services against their product life cycles, and brainstorm new product or service propositions for new customers. review what your staff and your customers dislike about your business processes. How Could they be improved?
How can you encourage greater workplace innovation? How might your business model need to change to meet the demands of the future? But global trends will impact most upon your business, run an innovation workshop with management and ask them the same questions. And do this to identify four important areas that your business or organization needs to work on and get the management authorization to proceed. As we come to the end of this course. Then, here are my seven top tips for innovation.
Number one, ask your customers what they don't like about doing business with you that will give you ideas for innovation that will have an immediate customer impact. Second, ask your staff what they don't like about your processes that will identify more problem points for retention. Third, draw a high level process map and mark the handoffs between teams, handoffs, and recall endpoints for systems are likely to be the main points of error in the process. Fourth, look at your competitors business models, what are they doing differently? And that will give you ideas for innovation. Fifth, look at companies that you admire, particularly in your region that you can get to what ideas can you get from them?
Six, find out if there's a government funded local enterprise agency in your area? If so, join their benchmarking program or their company visit program to glean ideas from other organizations. And seventh, think out of the box. What could you do that is radically different. And thinking out of the box is important. It's very easy to get stuck in a rut without thinking.
The structure provided in this course will help you look at aspects of business innovation from different angles. But it's also useful to shake up your thinking style in order to generate a greater range of ideas for consideration. Here are some ways you can start to think outside of the box. First, define the problem in 10 different ways, working with the group, create 10 different definitions of the problem, or the issue that you want to innovate in. This will really make you think creatively try to think of the problem from the point of view of different stakeholders, customers, owners, employees, regulators, and so on. Secondly, and this one is fun, act it out roleplay the problem assigning roles to different members of the group, customers involved, the employees involved, suppliers, managers, and so on.
This is a very lively and great fun way to get the creative juices flowing about the problem. Third, change your view. If I'm in the office, and I need to think of a problem from a different point of view, I get up and sit in a different chair in the room. Amazingly, this can give me a different perspective on the problem. If possible. I'll go out for a walk to cogitate on the problem.
And come up with new ideas about it. My message is if you change the space where you do thinking, you can change your thinking itself, to take the team out of the office to somewhere completely different. Do some team activities to relax everyone, and then start brainstorming. And don't wear work clothes. Try fancy dress, for example. Fourth, visit a business that has a reputation for creativity, and innovation, and see how they do their thinking.
As we come to the end of the course, then, let's look at what we've learned. We've learned that innovation is about doing things better, and doing better things. And we've seen that markets and business practices are changing faster than ever. And the innovation is vital for your survival. We've seen that we can innovate in all areas of the organization, products and markets, business processes, workplace practices, and the business model. And we've introduced a simple structure to provide a framework for innovation.
The four elements of it are, identify the areas where you need to innovate, form an innovation team and start fact finding, generate ideas for innovation. And fourthly, test your ideas and select the best. And finally, we've seen that the most innovative ideas come with a mixed team thinking outside the box. And so ladies and gentlemen, we come to the end of the course before we move on to the test your knowledge section. Let me just close with a few final points. Innovation is not a one off, change in the marketplace.
Change in business practices is constant. And so should your innovation efforts be so you should timetables, regulate innovation sessions, set up a team, get them together, get them talking about your processes, your markets and products, your business model, your workplace practices, keep exercising those innovation muscles You need to stay in the game and I wish you the best of luck.