The business landscape is becoming more and more competitive. What’s a small business to do in order to differentiate oneself and beat the competition?

Innovate!

Any small business can innovate. It’s easy, affordable and sustainable. And your competition is probably not spending enough time on innovation themselves, so it would give you a competitive edge as well.

Take a step back and count how many hours you spent in the past month just thinking, brainstorming and creatively enhancing your company? At some firms, the marketing executives block off an hour or two every week exclusively for brainstorming. Have you even spent an hour in the past month doing any brainstorming?

The beauty of brainstorming and creative thinking is that it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s free! And the results can be significant.

Here are a number of ways to get you started towards driving innovation at your company, and leapfrogging the competition:

1. Read 10 magazines that you have never picked up before.
2. Read 10 blogs that you have never viewed before.
3. Review 10 websites of leading companies (not in your industry).
4. Invite someone you’ve admired in your industry to lunch.
5. Invite someone you’ve admired in another industry to lunch.
6. Block off time for brainstorming every day or every week.
7. Invite your customers to a brainstorming session.
8. Invite your vendors and partners to a brainstorming session.
9. Invite the smartest person you know to a brainstorming session.
10. Brainstorm using pictures and drawings rather than words.
11. Host brown bag lunches by inviting local “experts” from various fields to come in and educate your team.
12. Try crowdsourcing through services such as kluster.com.
13. Every morning make a list of three things that your company could do to improve itself.
14. Come up with 10 new ways to segment your audience into narrower and more-focused categories.
15. Come up with 10 ways that you could potentially partner with large corporations.
16. Come up with 10 ways that you could potentially partner with the competition.
17. Imagine you offered your main product or service for free – how could you build your business differently?
18. Keep an idea notebook with you at all times, and jot down thoughts as they come to you throughout the day. (You can use Jott.com for this as well.)
19. Redecorate a conference room into a creative think tank center.
20. Exercise before or after work, or during your lunch break.
21. Take a long walk.
22. Take the day off.
23. Start meditating.
24. Listen to music you have never heard before.
25. Visit a pre-school and remind yourself how youngsters explore everything around them.
26. Spend more time with your customers.
27. Allow all employees to spend 10% of their time on personal projects.
28. Allow all employees to spend a day a month doing charity work.
29. Swap employees for a day with one of your partners.
30. Prototype various ideas and see what resonates with your target audience, and what needs to go in the garbage bin.

Related posts:

1. Small Business Innovation: 3 Quick Ideas
2. Cross Pollination of Ideas (Small Business Innovation Series)
3. Why Online Competitive Analysis is So Useful
4. Using Your Website as an Innovation Platform, & Much More
5. Quick Website Evaluation: The Fast Company 50

Tags: innovation, small business innovation

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.