business innovation

Keeping up with the competition could put businesses under so much pressure to innovate. In short, it’s requiring them to expand and offer something new and better than the products and services they’ve previously been offering. 

Innovation entails a lot of hard work. It’s doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of ideas pooled together from a dedicated in-house team, like an innovation strategy consulting team, that works so hard to come up with those innovative ideas. The end result? Business growth. However, the danger is this—if you aren’t careful enough with your business innovation strategies, rather than helping your business grow, the opposite could happen.

Common Innovation Mistakes Hindering Business Growth

You may not be aware of it, but perhaps the innovations you’re applying are sabotaging your business’s growth and not helping in any way. These are major mistakes you need to avoid as they don’t only hurt your business growth potential, but they could also be costly—time-wise and resource-wise. 

What are these common business innovation mistakes? Here’s a list of them.

1. Not Providing The Proper Mechanism To Make Innovation A Reality

There are businesses that nudge, ask, or pressure their team to regularly come up with innovative ideas, but then it stops there. The problem isn’t with the team or employees as they usually come up with the ideas, indeed. The real problem lies in the lack of a proper mechanism to implement these ideas. Visit https://corningdata.com/sap-consulting/ to learn how the correct application of an ERP software can maximize productivity and eliminate redundancies.

After so much time and effort exerted by employees in the brainstorming, researching, and reporting of these innovations, sometimes no further action is taken after this stage. As such, business growth is stunted.

This is where the business’s fault comes in. Before demanding various innovative ideas from your employees, be sure you have the mechanism to turn these concepts into a reality. Otherwise, they remain merely as that—ideas. 

Once you’ve assessed certain ideas from your team that you know have good potential, consider opening up opportunities to realize these ideas. Otherwise, you’d have a long list of wasted concepts. 

2. Believing That The More Ideas Thrown On The Table, The Better  

It might be wrong to focus on the quantity of ideas and not the quality. Your business’s potential for innovation and growth doesn’t become higher just because you’ve got so many ideas thrown at the conference table during discussions. Of these many ideas presented, some could just be thrown overboard for being substandard or mediocre, while others could end up being stuck for lack of a proper mechanism to implement them, as discussed above. 

Therefore, when it comes to creating business innovations, it’s not how many ideas your team has come up with that matters. Rather, it’s how good those ideas are and how effective they could be in bringing in the intended result you want for your business, no matter how few those ideas might be.

This is where sound discussion is essential—to ensure the concepts your team presents aren’t merely brought to the table for the sake of just submitting ideas for innovation. They should be backed up by research and discussion to show they have good quality and potential to bring in growth for the business and, thus, are worth pursuing.

3. Pushing For Answers Without First Looking At Problems That Need Solutions 

One of the basic ways for your business to innovate is to look at all the current problems faced by your target market that need solutions. Customers wouldn’t buy products if they don’t solve their common problems, no matter how well made they are. Think of people who want to have fairer skin, hence the whitening products, or parents who struggle with sleep, hence the coming in of sleep machines for their babies, among the many.

Through research and survey, you may find, for example, that young millennials within your local area who happen to be the market of your business’s niche need products to help them with their productivity. This is an opportunity you may want to take advantage of. If you could come up with innovative products that could solve this problem, you could have a high potential for growth. You’d have a target market willing to purchase your products and services simply because they need them.

This would secure your growth potential. First, your market share would increase. Then your profit potential would increase as well. 

4. Involving Too Many People Too Soon

When you’re still in the early stages of your business innovation, try not to involve too many people too soon. Otherwise, you could be wasting the efforts of your workforce with an innovation that may still possibly fail.

Rather than training so many employees and getting them on board a specific project innovation, you could start with a small group instead. That way, there’d be better focus, and your team won’t likely be all over the place. This would make it easier to check and have accountability for each member of the team, which could ensure good progress is going to be made. When your purpose is to spur growth, no resource can be wasted as this would lead to failure instead.

Remember that in business, risks are always present. So if the risk of failure is around, you’ve only got a small team to account for and not a big group that would now have to start again from scratch with another task they have to get accustomed to.

Conclusion

This list of common mistakes in business innovations isn’t meant to keep you from giving your all when innovating for your company’s growth. Rather, at the very least, these are meant to give you awareness so you could be on the lookout and avoid the same mistakes in your future innovations. 

And if you think your business may have already been committing some of the mistakes above, it’s not yet too late to correct them in order not to stunt your business’s growth. Also, learning from another business’s mistakes is likewise a good way for your company to grow as it would enable you to be more cautious with the strategies you want to employ.