Session 8: Innovation In Your Business
In this session we make another transition. The last few sessions we've been viewing
Entrepreneurism through the needs of the customer. But Entrepreneurs needs to balance 3
needs - the needs of ourselves, the needs of our customer, and the needs of the business.
It's time for us to focus on this topic from the perspective of the business. We'll be
thinking of the business as an organism all by itself, and we're going to learn what we need
to do to make it healthy and help it get its needs met so it can grow and flourish.
Two of the things we can do to make sure the business is healthy is to focus on:1) innovation and 2) execution. These are more evolved forms of some of the tools and techniques that we've already learned. We learned about creativity and productivity. From the business perspective, creativity becomes innovation, and productivity becomes execution.
Innovation is what we'll focus on in this session. Innovation is about the process of continually using creativity to improve on the best products and marketing you can create. It's not just about new and different ideas... it's about creating something that's BETTER... better in the eye of the customer. As you develop processes for creating better products and marketing, your business itself becomes more innovative. The business itself "gets good" at creating better products and marketing.
Life thrives at the intersections. So does Innovation. In ancient Greece there was a place called The Agora where all the roads came together from the surrounding areas. This is where a marketplace would emerge - it's where business took place. So be sure to go to conferences and watch what other businesses are doing. Exposing yourself to these fertile intersections can spawn new and innovative ideas you can apply to your company.
One thing you need to do when you're innovating in business is balance both creation and destruction. Hegel and Marx, two powerful philosophers from history, had this process called the Dialectic. You have your thesis, then an antithesis, and finally a synthesis at a higher level of thinking. This kind of process - where you have these opposites that seem like they don't fit together - doesn't sit right in the human mind. But it's a process we have to learn if we want to continually innovate.
Becoming innovative isn't just about doing new and better things on the "horizontal" level... it's also about the vertical level. Instead of doing the current business better (horizontal), maybe the business needs to be in a different market altogether (vertical). For example, I started out my business with a simple eBook of dating advice for men. It did pretty well. Then I zoomed out and had other dating advisors write books and create programs, using all the internal business systems we developed. And that worked too. Then I zoomed out again and realized that a lot of people want to learn how we built our business. So I created another training company teaching other the secrets to our own business' growth and how they could do the same. That too was a success. And in the last few years I've been asked to be an advisor and investor in cutting edge companies.
We can keep zooming out and innovating - not just with the products and services we offer - but in the whole vision of what it is we do. In whatever industry you're in, there's a higher level to go to.
