Innovation and Creativity in Small Business

Small businesses rely largely on the “next big thing” in order for their business to grow a customer base. Therefore, the small businesses must be innovative in their thinking in order to come up with new ideas. The article, “How to innovate: A step-by-step guide,” starts out by talking about a funeral home director who started up his business by finding out from the customers how their loved ones would like to be honored. In response to this, the funeral home specializes services with anything from transporting the dearly departed person’s Harley Davidson motorcycle to the funeral home or entirely moving the services to places such as golf courses. The article addresses five steps for innovation which I believe go hand-in-hand with the creative decision-making model which I will discuss later. The first step is to “look behind you” meaning that small business owners should take into consideration what those that came before them did to become successful and what the company has done to be successful in the past. The second step is to “lose the routine,” meaning that management and their employees need to live life and have experiences that will open their minds up to new ideas. The third step is to “use the brains you hired”; employees are a huge part of coming up with the ideas for the company and they should be encouraged to do so. The fourth step is to “get cozy with your customers” which means that a small business’ management and employees should develop close relationships with their customers in order to really understand what their needs and wants are. The last two steps include possibly finding a partner to gain ideas and investments from and also learning how to fail quickly. Those two steps allow small businesses to try out more of their ideas without taking on all of the financial pressure that could come with such decisions.

In order for companies to come up with new and exciting ideas that will aid in continued growth, they must use a creative decision-making model. As displayed in Chapter 11 of our textbook, the creative decision-making process has five steps: problem recognition, immersion, incubation, illumination, and verification (and application). The steps of innovation discussed previously come into play with the immersion, incubation, and illumination steps of the creative decision-making process. During immersion, the small business must step out of their normal routine of doing things, look at the history of their company, and gain an understanding of their customers. This process will allow the small business to gain the information they need to solve the problem of dwindling business or the need for a new idea. During illumination, when the problem’s solution comes to light, a small business could use a partner or other outsiders to bounce their ideas off of. The end stage, when verification and application occurs, companies need to be sure to speed up the process in order to “fail quickly.” Spending too much time on an idea that just will not work is a waste of time and extra resources. The small business should quickly move onto starting the process over again.

As far as “using the brains you hired,” employee creativity can be used and improved by methods such as brainstorming, idea quotas, and wildstorming. Most people know what brainstorming is but wildstorming is an interesting method because it allows employees to take the ideas that seem next to impossible and think of ways to make them possible. I also think idea quotas are a good idea because they encourage employees and groups of employees to come up with a large number of ideas before ending the brainstorming process.

I thought all of these ideas for innovation were very interesting and should definitely be taken into consideration when delving into the creative decision-making process. Would you agree? What might you add to make the creative process even better?

Posted By: Brittany Meredith