What Is Business Innovation And How Do You Achieve And Manage It?
The global business landscape has seen drastic changes over the years. A transition to the gig economy and the explosive growth of industries like FinTech and social media platforms like TikTok has enabled more individuals to embark on the entrepreneurial journey. For instance, in 2021, there were around five million private businesses in the United Kingdom.
Yet, none of this means anything unless these companies demonstrate the ability to think outside the box. Innovation is the key to success in business, and it plays a defining role in a company’s growth versus its competitors.
What Is Business Innovation?
Business innovation is the process of introducing something new to a company, such as marketing strategies, to promote new growth. In general, the first step in business innovation is to generate a new idea. That sounds easy, but it means a company has to can pick out the good from the bad. These concepts can come from industry trends, popular culture, and inside or outside a company’s walls. Organisations also have to have the ability to nurture ideas to full term.
What Industries Are Leaders?
To achieve innovation, a company needs to utilise new technologies in different areas of its business, be proactive to stay ahead of its competition and keep growing. Over the years, several companies and industries have proven themselves capable of this.
For instance, Netflix recently proved it has what it takes to achieve business innovation after moving into mobile gaming in 2021. The mobile gaming market is one of the biggest in the world, and there are new technologies in this industry emerging every day — even NFTs found their way into gaming. Netflix has capitalised on this reality, and now, analysts project the company will see an increase in its monthly subscriptions in 2022.
The online casino industry is also an established leader, as it’s constantly evolving by using new technologies (i.e. live streaming) to create new games. For example, take slot games. They’ve been around forever, but one issue with traditional slot games is they use the same ideas. However, new slots incorporate new themes and concepts and offer innovative bonus features. This ability to use new technologies and offer playing incentives has allowed the online casino industry to acquire long-term success.
Innovation Principles Broken Down
As mentioned, one of the best ways to achieve innovation is to incorporate new technologies in different areas of your business, such as marketing. For example, TikTok has changed the traditional marketing model, which, as we covered, now heavily relies on technology and will continue to do so next year. American language-learning website Duolingo is one of the best examples of a business recognising the influence of this technology and incorporating it into its marketing plan to promote growth.
As of December 2021, the Duolingo TikTok account has two million followers. It is also one of the most engaging brand accounts on the platform. For comparison, its competitor Babble USA has less than 5,000 TikTok followers. That is because this education service has not adopted TikTok and its unique culture into its business in the way Duolingo has. As a result, Duolingo has managed to stay ahead of its competitor, which is key as anticipating or following trends is how you achieve innovation.
Business innovation is achieved by growth. When you stop growing and become comfortable with a single-revenue model, that’s when the competition surpasses you. We could argue this is why so many professional athletes have income opportunities, such as clothing brands, off the field. If they just relied on game day, they may never grow their brand.
Investing in innovation can be time-consuming, but the long-term benefits outweigh this. Fortunately, through innovation management, almost every business can achieve this level of success by utilising technology and developing a competitive edge.
