Business Innovation For Growth BCL178

Innovation For Growth

On this edition of Business Connections Live, Costas  Papaikonomou, one of the founding partners of The Happen Group talks to Steve Hyland about Business Innovation For Growth. Costas shares both sides of the equation revealing that size doesn’t really matter when it comes to innovating more successfully.

So what do we mean by Innovation for growth In essence:

Spot the frustrations your consumers have, then answer those needs with a product or service that is commercially viable.

Regardless of the size of your organisation, we are always looking for more and better ways to be innovative. We strive to maximise the resources we have in our business. This can include manpower, manufacturing processes and how we use our time. Innovation for growth means examining all aspects of your business and applying procedures that increase the return on your investment.Spot the frustrations your consumers have, then answer those needs with a product or service that is commercially viable. 

Reinvent your product, service or brand. Identify your changing customer requirements and look for solutions that allow you to service that need with your existing systems and procedures. This is not about reinventing the wheel but about developing and adapting the wheel.

Happen, who are they?

Happen is a global business that helps businesses and brands grow through innovation. Whether it’s large multi-national corporations, or single-brand family owned – the ways to innovate in busy markets are effectively the same.

The challenge is often to pull both levers instead of one. And while smaller organisations wish they had the clout and cash of the big corporations, the big boys wish they were still small and nimble to get things moving swiftly.

On this edition of Business Connections Live, Costas will explain:

• HowInnovation is about business relevance, not creativity.
• Uncover consumer insights you can do something with, not mere market truths.
• Creating commercially viable products/services, using existing assets.
• Building momentum and confidence to get things moving.

Learn the business fundamentals on how your business can achieve:

• Peace of mind: you don’t need to be big to innovate well.
• You don’t even need a lot of money.
• The important differences between innovating to Protect, Grow or Transform your business. All have different start- and end-points.
• You don’t need to fund a digital start-up to succeed. On the contrary, stay away from that nonsense.
• Think in propositions, rather than products.

For more great information visit our Guests website or follow them on Social Media. Website: www.happen.com Twitter: @happentweets Twitter: @grumpyinnovator LinkedIn: Happen.com

Understand why you’re innovating. 4 things to remember

1. What’s the business reason for actually even doing anything? Which means you need to understand, are you solving a big problem or a small problem?
2. The second is work on insights you can actually act upon. So if you‘re working in a salad business and you’re creating salads, spend some time with people while they’re eating salads. If you want to see some new things don’t get it from reports that talk about what it was like when people were thinking about eating salads.
3. The third one is, create ideas that actually make commercial sense. Not copying your competition but doing things that are right for you. 
4. The fourth one is, energise the business into action. Which means it’s not just the people creating the ideas that are going to push it through. The whole organisation needs to sit behind it from the top all the way to the bottom. Why?  because there are a lot of naysayers probably scattered around any organisation, you have to make sure that they go into yes mode to really help your ideas fly.