Ideas to Help Spark an Innovative Product or Service Idea for Your Business

Innovation is a gaudy term. It has many conjuring up the world-changing products that seemingly came out of nowhere. But coming up with the ideas that might eventually be seen as innovative is tough to visualise from a baseline of nothing.

Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t cultivate an environment or come up with a system that could lead to that big or small breakthrough. Land on that idea, and it could vault your business ahead of the competition. Here, we’ll explore how different businesses managed to innovate. We’ll also explore how a business can find innovation.

Examples of the Novel and Useful

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Innovations don’t have to be a brand-new product that will change anything. An innovative move can be a change to the status quo, a different way of creating, or the process of gradual advancements. A prime example of this comes from Dyson.

The story goes that James Dyson disliked emptying the bag of his vacuum cleaner. He also noticed that the system led to diminishing performances. So, he went about creating a bagless vacuum cleaner. The technology revolutionised the industry and led to several other great Dyson inventions.

Going bagless was a big change for the status quo of the products. On the other hand, in the automotive industry, Toyota has gone for an approach of more gradual continual development. They look at all of the different functions and processes of driving on a microscopic level. From there, their engineers set about making them each a little bit better, resulting in steady but great improvement over time.

It's not just physical products. Services can also be streamlined. Take the rigmarole of selling a house. It’s a very time-consuming process involving many different points of contact. To improve this, modern platforms have evolved to let people sell house fast. These services cut out all of the middlemen from the side of the seller. They also cover the legal costs and processes like bringing in surveyors. The biggest selling point, however, is the speed. Sellers simply go online and get a free cash offer. If accepted, the funds can be in the seller’s account in as few as seven days.

So you see, innovation can happen as gradually or as dramatically as you can imagine, and in all areas of business. The question is, what does the road to innovation look like?

Making Space for Innovation to Arise

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Creativity is the aim of the game. Being creative means encountering failures and working through them. To enable this, you need to be nimble. You jump on the opportunity to explore an idea, quickly run it through, and accept failure constructively. Don’t let any failures derail the process. Continue to experiment and work on ideas.

Whether it’s you yourself or your team, enable a space where ideas can be acted on. If someone has an idea of how to make a process more efficient or sees an issue with a product, follow it up. Some won’t lead anywhere, but going through the motions won’t be time wasted. If something needs to be better, you can make it so eventually.

It’s here that you’ll find truly innovative ideas. Pursue them, allow for failures, and keep digging at anything that could create something novel and useful.