EOW Reflections: We’re missing a trick
When it comes to innovation, small is beautiful. Innovation has become a business buzzword: the answer to the economy’s problems, the route to increased growth and productivity, the answer to successfully competing on the world stage. While all that is true, we seem to be thinking ‘big’ and forgetting that small can be innovative too.
Innovation is doing something different to create value. It’s about taking creative ideas that have a chance of working and turning them into viable solutions to existing problems. It’s introducing new ideas, ways of working, better ‘stuff’ or services. The greatest innovations may result in big big changes and significant improvements, in the business itself or in the results for customers, wider society, or the economy, but sometimes important innovation comes in small steps.
Small businesses have always been creative. Creativity drives great ideas. If they’re novel ideas they’re innovative. But to be truly innovative they have to be useful. Every day, small businesses come up with creative ideas. Many of them are unworkable but some, with the right encouragement could be life changing. How many world class businesses started in workshops, bedrooms and sheds with one determined creative person. Trains, planes and automobiles all started as creative ideas in someone’s dreams. Wrightbus has come a long way from a small garage in Northern Ireland 75 years ago (via generations of London’s iconic red buses) to the builder of the pioneering hydrogen buses, leading the way in the transport industry’s age of green mobility.
If you want to compete and stay at the top of the pile, you’re always looking for great ideas to put into action. Business owners are constantly looking for better ways of doing things, often because the problems they’re trying to address aren’t responding to existing solutions. But we’re in danger of seeing ‘innovation’ only when the idea is big, the results are dramatic and the solutions grab the headlines.
Every business, from the freelance consultant providing much-needed services to the firm pushing the boundaries of clean energy production has to be innovative otherwise they don’t survive. People starting up small and micro businesses are innovative by nature, making their creative ideas into viable operations to create value for their communities and adding social value, as well as value for themselves and their families. We’re in danger of failing to spot small innovations and give them the support they need, when they need it, because we’re backing only the big and noticeable. Backers of innovation have to look for it everywhere or miss huge opportunities.
Small businesses are creative, flexible, agile and may be big one day with the right backing. The right support may not always be financial. It can be a simple as the right information or the right words of wisdom at the right time. We need to make sure every business has the support that will help it get from creative idea to viable innovative solution, creating value for themselves, society and the economy along the way.