The companies that have done the best so far are those who are the most creative and innovative. These companies don’t copy what others do, they use innovative ideas from others to come up with a unique application, product, or service for themselves or they come up with disruptive ideas, that are completely new to the world. These companies tend to distance themselves from the competition rather than compete with them, they focus on bringing value to the market and be different, be unique. And this article is about creativity and innovation, about how to be successful and unique.
All companies can be more creative and innovative no matter what their expertise, product, or service is about. When you apply creativity and innovation to every aspect of your business, you are able to stay ahead of a changing marketplace and the competition. Change and innovation are closely related, even though they are not the same. Change often involves new and better ideas. The new idea may be the creation of a new product or process or it can be an idea about how to change completely the way business is carried out.
In Apiumhub, we believe that being innovative in business is all about thinking ahead; discovering something new in what might seem obvious to others. And age doesn’t mean anything, nowadays people think that when you are 20-30 years ols you have more chances to come up with something creative, but in this article you may find that actually people over 50 are good in it as well.
Here comes my favorite quote: “An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it” – Bill Bernbach. And this is so true!
Over the last decades, innovation and creativity have become critical skills for achieving success. The need for creative problem solving has arisen as more and more management problems require creative insights in order to find suitable solutions. And let’s not forget that creativity goes hand in hand with innovation. And there is no innovation without creativity. While creativity is the ability to produce new and unique ideas, innovation is the implementation of that creativity.
Tips on Driving Creativity and Innovation
- Innovation is based on knowledge. Therefore, you need to continually expand your knowledge base. Read things you don’t normally read! At the end of the article you will find absolutely great list of innovation books that I recommend to read.
- Your perceptions may limit your reasoning. Be careful about basing your decisions on your preferences and perceptions, ask people or your potential target about what they think about your idea or a problem that you are trying to solve.
- Let your imagination run wild. You really should not be bound by any limits when searching for new ideas. Keep an open mind.
- Let your ideas incubate by taking a break from them. It will help to you to come up with other ideas or improve existing ones or look at them from different angle. Sometimes it helps to disconnect just for several minutes or hours and find a cool and inspiring place or go to nature. Sometimes you need weeks and months. The most important here is not to rush.
- Test your idea. Once you are ready to start marketing your product, ask your customers if they like it and if they are really interested in it.
- Experience as much as you can. Actively seek out new experiences to broaden your experience portfolio.
- Have a vision for change and fight the fear of change. Replace the comfort with the hunger of ambition. You cannot expect your team to be innovative if they do not know the direction in which they are headed. Innovation has to have a purpose.
- Create an environment of innovation. Beautiful outdoor areas and interesting, attractive indoor spaces can help spark ideas and creativity to help drive the company’s innovation initiatives. Loot at highly successful innovative companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google or promising and fast growing startups to see what they do in terms of office design and employee entertainment. You’ll find open, interesting spaces, places to play games, spots to relax, areas to get some exercise, etc.
- Enable organizational agility. At most innovative organizations, job definitions are flexible and fluid. These companies know that the roles their employees play must adapt to the changing needs of the market. For example, at FedEx assists executives in moving between functions in order to accumulate a diverse range of experiences that improve their overall adaptability. Dow Chemical encourages employees to move functionally and geographically to gain new perspectives on the business and build capabilities for independent thinking and problem-solving.
- Dare to risk, dare to make mistakes. Yes, you can learn from your mistakes, and yes, sometimes clichés are clichés for a reason: because they are true. ‘If you never try anything new, you’ll miss out on many of life’s great opportunities.
- Be sustainable. It is now an absolute necessity.
- Give your employees the freedom they need. Give them the time and freedom they need to develop new ideas. For example, Google runs its famous “20 percent time” programme, in which employees are free to work on their own projects one day a week. Many of Google’s flagship products, such as Gmail and Google News, were developed initially as “20 percent time” projects.
These are just few tips on how to become more innovative and creative, the full list of tips you may find here.
Some Innovative Ideas
1. Healthy fast food
Nowadays people have less and less time. Now the option to eat something fast became very popular. But last years, people seek out healthy alternatives. Restaurants or food trucks or cafeterias that offer acai bowls, quinoa-kale salads made up of fresh and local ingredients, fresh smoothies, etc., are generating money as never and become more popular year by year.
2. Delivery services for just about anything
We are working harder now than ever before. Between our jobs, school, family, social activities and hobbies, we just don’t have time to pick up our own dry cleaning, or even to bring takeout to work. While this is a problem for most, it’s an opportunity for the modern entrepreneur. It is proven that people will pay to have just about anything done for them. They already pay Postmates and Uber Eats to deliver food to their homes and workplaces. And with the rise of services like Amazon Prime Now, people can have everything from groceries to electronics delivered to their doorstep in under two hours. The concept has already proven itself, all you have to do is figure out what you’d like to deliver and how.
3. Container-free local food shopping
Many consumers are concerned about how much resources are wasted in the food packaging process. Often, cardboard, plastic, etc. are not recycled, leading to environmental waste. Now the center of almost every business is sustainability and container-less shopping for locally-sourced, sustainable, organic foods is on a big rise now.
If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to solve a problem, fulfill a need or create a desire to buy. I just mentioned 3 cool ideas, but there are much more and we will look at innovative and inspiring businesses that are truly thinking outside the box. Some of these creative companies make life a little more fun, while others actually save or improve lives. Some involve technology that sounds like it comes from a science fiction movie. Here are our picks for the 5 most interesting businesses to track this year.
5 Innovative and Creative Startups to Watch in 2017
1. Kaggle
Has a network of 17,000 PhD-level people that help each other solve impossible problems.
NASA, Delloite, and The University of Michigan have all turned to Kaggle’s pool of 17,000 PhD-level scientists to solve complex problems and create winning models. It uses the collective knowledge of some of the world’s smartest people to make vast improvements in the world.
2. Zipline: Drones that will save lives
Zipline builds drones that can transport life-saving medical supplies like vaccines, medicines, or blood.It kicked off in Rwanda, where poor roads and healthcare infrastructure have often made it difficult to reach patients.
3. Roadrunner Recycling
Roadrunner Recycling is a waste management service that picks up businesses’ recyclable materials. It uses analytics software to maximize efficiency and help everyone save money.
4. Cimcon Lighting
Cimcon lighting makes smart lighting control systems for businesses and cities.
5. Grabble
Grabble is one of the fastest growing fashion tech startups, often described as “Tinder for fashion”. This app lets users swipe through personalised fashion suggestions curated by human stylists and buy with two taps. Its system integrates easily with existing online stores, including ASOS, Topshop and Zara.
15 of the Best Books on Innovation
If this topic is interesting for you, here you have a lit of the 15 best books on innovation.
Steve Jobs has reinvented music distribution, the mobile telephone, and book publishing. You might want to take a look at how someone creates multi-billion dollar ideas, and turns them into multi-billion dollar products that everyone loves and admires. Here you will find a simple step by step program of powerful tools and proven techniques inspired by Steve Jobs’s legendary presentations.
2. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
From one of the leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives
Filling an important gap in knowledge and research on global innovation, the author demonstrates how leaders can facilitate multicultural collaboration in service of organizational performance. Cases and findings are shared from international studies of over 200 leaders and 45 multinational firms with headquarters based in Asia, Europe, and North America. This book offers crucial guidance for executives, managers, consultants, and educators who would like to understand how to lead and orchestrate innovation in a culturally diverse and networked business environment.
4. Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell
Today, managers are often told that they must “innovate or die,” but are given little useful guidance on how to go about it. Business innovation expert Greg Satell helps you find your way by revealing the four models of innovation: Basic Research, Breakthrough Innovation, Sustaining Innovation, and Disruptive Innovation. Here you will also find insights into how the world’s top innovators implement their innovation strategies.
5. The Innovation Revolution: Discover the Genius Hiding in Plain Sight vy K. Melissa Kennedy
This book delivers proven billion-dollar startup secrets reengineered for the enterprise to break up business log jams, stop internal dysfunction and create intrapreneurs empowered to innovate at speed inside the corporate framework.
6. How Innovation Really Works: Using the Trillion-Dollar R&D Fix to Drive Growth by Anne Marie Knott
In this book you will find how much to invest in R&D to ensure that investment will increase revenues, profits, and market value. Armed with insights from person experience as an R&D project manager, 20 years of academic research, and two National Science Foundation grants, Knott devised RQ and used the measure to test common innovation prescriptions across the full spectrum of U.S. companies engaged in R&D.
In Innovating, Perez-Breva describes how to create a kit for innovating, and outlines questions that will help you think in new ways. Also, he shows how to systematize what you’ve learned: to advocate, communicate, scale up, manage innovating continuously, and document.
In this book, the author is featuring six ways to disrupt the status quo and reinvent the way we work. The Innovation Mentality gives entrepreneurial and corporate leaders the tools they need to work with colleagues and employees to harness the power of positive change for the long term.
9. The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game by Andrew Grant, Gaia Grant
Best-selling authors Andrew and Gaia Grant give clues on how to stay ahead in the race and design a more sustainable future. They also provide concrete strategies to support purpose-driven sustainable innovation through deep cultural transformation.
This book is a good guide to implementing the most successful innovation agenda possible, whether for a startup or established multinational. Full of practical examples, case studies and tips, the low risk innovation techniques presented will guarantee your plans achieve the best outcomes without risking your job or company.
The Innovation Formula delivers strategies for building a culture where innovation can thrive, based on actual scientific research. Author Amantha Imber holds a PhD in organisational psychology, and has been called upon by a multinational roster of forward-thinking companies such as Google, Disney, LEGO and Virgin to improve innovation at all levels. In this book, she shares her strategies and helps you tap into a substantial body of scientific research to help further innovative practice within your own company.
Being a truly innovative company is more than dreaming up new products and services; it requires a complete change to a company’s organizational culture, where innovation is embodied in everything that gets done by everyone who works there. Building a Culture of Innovation presents a practical framework that business leaders can implement to design and embed permanent innovation. Authors Cris Beswick, Derek Bishop, and Jo Geraghty present a six-step Innovation Culture Change Framework. Each chapter contains tools and techniques, diagrams, helpful tips, and case studies from international organizations which have shifted their focus to an innovation culture, including Prudential, Cisco, and Siemens.
Steve Jobs ran his business with a different philosophy than other businesses. He took risks, although they were calculated. He gave people what they wanted before they knew that they wanted it. It is this sort of visionary entrepreneurship that every career driven businessman and businesswoman envy. Reading this book you will learn from all of his successes and his failures. You will learn what drove him to success and what picked him up when he was low.
Today, 40 percent of all venture capital investments in the United States come from Silicon Valley firms, compared to 10 percent from New York. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem. She explores Silicon Valley’s exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. In this book you will find interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as case studies with technology and Internet companies, like Google and Paypal.
Innovation is a primary source of economic growth, and yet only one idea out of 3,000 becomes a successful product or service. This book introduces a model for the innovation process, helping innovators to understand the nature and timing of opportunities and risks on the path to success. The authors apply systems thinking to discover real-life challenges, and provide tools for turning these challenges into opportunities for practical, scalable innovation.
