Innovation for Success

In previous blogs and newsletters I have shared with you the importance of great leadership, cashflow, creativity and innovation in your business. Focusing on developing and improving in these areas will help you stay ahead of the game. I wanted to understand more about the latter and signed up to a workshop run by Scottish Enterprise on innovation for success. The learning will certainly help me in my business and I wanted to also share it with you.

Now initially when I heard the word actor at the event I immediately thought of the gorgeous George Clooney and the sexy Brad Pitt but no to my surprise ACTOR is the name of a systematic process for inventive thinking. We learn something new every day.

So when it comes to innovation here is what ACTOR stands for:

Analyse—explore issues, define context and gain perspective.
Create—use systematic ideas to learn, share expertise and generate ideas.
Think—think business context, clarify strategic success criteria and filter the best ideas.
Opportunities—identify desired outcomes, cluster ideas into opportunities and draw up a one page plan.
Results—drive project deliverables, deliver new products and achieve results for the business.

Together with this model I learned how to apply different creativity tools such as multiplication, subtraction, division, task unification and lots more. I know it sounds like a mathematics class at school but really for me it was fabulous learning with a few “lightbulb” moments.

Some great questions to ask yourself in business innovation are:
· As a business what can we do differently that our customers want?
· What world does our business operate in?
· Who do we interact with in business?
· What else is going on around our business?

The workshop was excellent, very interactive and great fun. The strange looking photo above is from one of the groupwork activities where we had to use our creativity and innovation (sadly my group didn’t win).

I am now much more clearer on the concepts of innovation in business and ideally where it is placed—INNOVATION sits in between evolution and revolution. Give it a go today