Sparking innovation in a small business isn’t just a matter of sitting around waiting for good ideas to pop into your CEO’s head. Innovation comes from a lot of places, and the right environment can turn all of your employees into idea generators.
Recently Karl Start and Bill Steward of Avondale Strategic Partners, a business advisory company, posted an article on Inc about reigniting innovation in a business (read it here). It was a great post that focused on getting ideas from the field – customers and employees who spend time with customers. The three principal actions they proposed were:
- Get cozy with customers
- Empower your team
- Execute fast and revise quickly
Excellent ideas and you should read the post. It also reminds us of a post that our CEO & resident cloud computing expert wrote a couple of years about entitled “4 Tips to Spark Innovation in Your Small Business.”
Prasad’s small business innovation ideas
Prasad’s ideas were different, but along the same lines as the executives from Avondale. Prasad said, “Small businesses are the major driver in both job growth and innovation in the United States. But when you are actually running a small business, finding the time to foster innovation can be overwhelmed by cash, economic, resource and time constraints. Here are four tips that I have found that foster innovation at my company and that I believe can be applied to most businesses.”
- Encourage all employees to solve company problems
- Allow individual employees time to work on a project of their choosing
- Provide employees experiences in every aspect of the company
- Consult customers for improvements and new ideas
Innovation can happen in a vacuum, but usually it is driven by the right work and team environment. We hope that another way you can generate innovative ideas to grow your small business is by letting the power of cloud computing free up your time and resources so that you can focus on solving problems for your customers.
