We established in the previous blog article that Innovation needs to be done, always. Innovation should be a regular part of the manager’s focus and staff activity in any business. But what is innovation and how can it be applied to your business?

There are typically four main types of innovation that we see in business:

Market Pull Innovation: this is a response to what your customers want. Based on their needs and wants your business can respond and develop the further product offering to meet those needs. This is typically the normal evolution of a products life cycle. We launch with an MVP or minimal Viable Product and then iterate according to customers comments and needs.

Technology Push Innovation: this is when a new product or technology comes on the market that the potential customers do not yet know of or have a need for. This could be a whole new product or an additional feature to an existing product. This becomes a harder sell to customers and often only taken up by the early adaptors within your customer base. But as the technology and benefits get known it turns from a push into a pull and the demand grows.

Frugal Innovation: We have come to see a lot of this in recent times in our own personal lives as well as in business. Frugal innovation addresses how we do more with less. Cutting back on resources such as electricity, water and staff and common across all sectors. The awareness of environmental impact and cost saving all lead to frugal innovation in business.

Marketing Innovation is an interesting one that we follow closely. It is the constant battle for customer attention through marketing. Brands spend huge sums of money with agencies to develop campaigns that will get the initial attention of customers and then try to keep it as long as possible driving this attention to sales. Creative campaigns include great TV and radio adverts together with client engagement activities.

But no matter what type of innovation you do in your business, ensure that it is client focused and moves your business away from any decline or plateau in sales and customer attention.

Last week I had the opportunity to present to a group of business owners on why we need Innovation in business. The majority of the audience seemed a little shell-shocked at the reasons for innovation and the need to have innovation as part of the regular activity in any business.

So let me unpack some of these here in this and a series of blogs for you to read through.

Why do we need to innovate in business?

Three main reasons support this answers, but all have the same purpose. Attention span: personal attention span, product attention span and the life cycle of a business. For each one the life or attention span is limited and soon drops off as people get tired, things change and new things come into focus. If we are expecting our business to continue to flourish as it may have done once before by changing nothing, then think again. If you are at a plateau in the cycle thinking things will be ok, then map this against the rest of the world and you will soon see that you’re flat, or even slight growth looks dismal against the relative growth of the economy and new innovation of the markets.

Mapping your customer’s attention span or engagement to your product on a graph will show you the key places where the slumps are and when customers begin to move away to other brand or substitute products.

Any product life cycle has an initial hype cycle followed by a decline and plateau season. This is then followed by a slump of attention and purchases. Once again, mapping this out will detail the different trends and takeup from your customers.

The final graph to use is the business bell curve or life cycle. The bell curve clearly shows the early success, plateau and decline of a business. Every business goes through the same cycle, just the timing may differ. It is a wise and productive business owner who is able to manage this by innovating at the right time to lengthen the businesses lifespan as well as the customer’s attention and the product’s lifecycle.

Innovation does not need to be a huge change or revamp of your logo and change of corporate colours. It is often small regular changes to keep your brand fresh and top of mind for your customers.

Next blog we will look at the different types of innovation as we begin to unpack some of the things you can do for your business to keep it fresh and in business.