Innovation to Blow Away Your Competition

Every successful business does some sort of innovation. The most successful businesses have a process for innovation. When you incorporate a process of innovation into your business, you will blow away your competition.

Before I reveal a simple formula for implementing an innovation process in your business, we should first discuss what innovation is, and is not.

Innovation is not seeing what good or service is selling in your marketplace and/or seeing what is new, and copying it. That is copying and in any market, it’s the “first mover” who reaps the rewards of the market.

If you are a copier, chances are there are other companies out there who are also in the process of copying the product or service. Therefore, you just become “one of them” when you launch yours. You become a “commodity.”

Innovation, quite simply is “the act of introducing something new.” When you introduce something new, you become different and you are valued higher. This means you will attract more business and can attract higher prices.

1. Ask. The first thing you need to do is ask a question-- what needs to change in your business to make you more competitive, to bring in more revenues, to manage expenses better. Do you need more products/service, do you need better products/service, is there a problem you can solve for you consumer.

Let’s say you have an existing product or service and you want to get more business. You are not going to change your product just yet because you don’t feel you have fully tapped the marketplace for revenues. So that would become your challenge-- How do we get more business?

2. Brainstorm. The next step in the process is to brainstorm ideas. It is best to do the innovation process in a group so everyone can play off of each other’s ideas and give a wide range of possibilities.

A great question to ask the group is, “What is impossible to do today, but if it could be done, would change the way our industry does business?”

Write all the ideas down and create a “Big Idea” book for the ideas you don’t do now but have potential to do down the road. You’ll create some really good ideas during these sessions. Don’t lose them!

3. Combine. After you’ve written all of the ideas down, start combining the ideas that make sense to combine to start creating potential processes or products. Create final “idea packages.”

4. Decide. Next, it is time to decide on which idea to take initiative. The most common way to do this is to vote or have the manager decide. This is not good. Rather, you should create a set of business criteria as to what you want to accomplish. Do this before you select an idea. Then choose the idea that scores the highest.

5. Test. Test the idea on a small scale. Before you do, forecast potential results. As you test, compare the results with what you forecasted. If they are close or better—great—you may have a winner on your hands. If not, get the team together and think about what the idea may be lacking and what it would take to get the desired results.

Change and test again. Do this until you either have a winner or you realize the idea is not worth pursuing.

6. Implement. Now that you have a winner, look at all of the possible channels this product, service, process or idea can influence and set up a plan to get it into as many as possible as fast as possible. Always test along the way to ensure you are getting the results you forecasted (milestones).

Some channels will perform better than others will, some will kill it and some will be duds. Let your winners run!

7. Review. At this point, the new innovation is in the marketplace or in your workplace (innovation can be used for processes within your company to make it more efficient and cost effective). It’s time to review your milestones and continue to expand the innovation further into the marketplace.

8. Repeat. It is time to repeat steps 1-7 as often as you can. By doing this, you will DOMINATE your market!

The real estate market is changing! To discover how to take advantage of this recovering market and get a 5-step proven formula to show you how create a $9,700 month to month passive income, go to www.rementor.com/freebookoffer and receive a FREE copy of David Lindahl's new book “Massive Passive Income - The Real Estate Investors Guide To Prosper In A Recovering Market.” Available FREE while supplies last.