To stay profitable in a small business, you need to be market-driven. To do this successfully you must, in the words of management guru Peter Drucker, "Take the lead in making obsolete your own products and services rather than waiting for a competitor to do so". And to do this effectively you need a flow of good ideas.
Unfortunately, for most small businesses, the time this takes is sometimes difficult to find. New opportunities for tomorrow are drowned by the crises of today.
This guide reviews how you can build idea generation into your management style, and thus create a steady flow of exciting new opportunities.
Recognising the possibilities
Here are some techniques that successful entrepreneurs use.
Many ideas arise spontaneously but like so much else, idea generation works best when handled systematically. This does not rule out inspiration, but instead channels creative thought to make it constructive.
So it is important to regard the process as:
Basic idea generation techniques
SWOT
One of the simplest ways to start is to analyse where your business is now.
There are many ways of viewing your business that help focus your thoughts, planning and implementation for the future. One of these is a SWOT analysis.
This looks at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The first two strands are essentially internal factors, the others external. Simply asking yourself searching questions under any of these four headings can provide a useful list of factors to explore further.
Such structured analysis can do two things:
Take a broader view
Sometimes opportunities arise from how you look at the broader picture. For example, one company looked specifically at market opportunities. They asked the simple, yet fundamental, question: “What business are we in?”
At the start the answer seemed clear enough. They “supplied scaffolding to the building trade”. However, they realised this was too restrictive. Their thinking then developed through three further stages:
All this came from:
It produced new customers, new products, new ways of doing things and far wider, and more profitable, markets. It may seem obvious with hindsight, but the creative thinking had to happen first.
Reassure people
You don't necessarily have to come up with all the ideas yourself. In fact, the best ones often come from your staff. So do all you can to encourage fresh, creative thinking. However, there may be reluctance to put ideas forward.
Idea stimulation
Even if you know where you want ideas – “I need a way to automate blueberry picking...” – you may benefit from a mechanism to stimulate ideas.
Some of the following techniques may help.
Two heads are better than one. So involve everyone in your team. This also helps you gain acceptance of the ideas later on because people will share ‘ownership’ of them, and so will be less likely to obstruct or sabotage them.
Brainstorm
Brainstorming is where a group assembles specifically to see what ideas they can come up with. It needs a prescribed approach to work effectively:
Such a session must exclude the word impossible, especially when linked to prejudice – “But we don't do things that way!” By discouraging any negative responses, and allowing ideas – however wild – to spark or refine others, you can often evolve new approaches that are practical and innovative.
As Einstein once said, “If an idea is not at first absurd there is no hope for it.”
An absurd solution to flying is to “Flap your arms like a bird.” However, analysing the difference between arms and wings results in a refinement of the idea: “Tie banana leaves on your arms to make your arms more wing-like.” But you still cannot fly because your arms are not strong enough to hold you in the air. So you develop the theme further: “Support the wings on a structure”... and you get a hang-glider.
Mind mapping
Mind mapping is “organised doodling”. Oversimplifying it perhaps, you start by drawing a circle in the middle of a large sheet of paper and write your problem inside it.
Then draw similar circles around it noting any factor that might have a bearing on the issue. Create sub-circles around these and continue the process until you see where it leads. In itself it helps to visualise the issues and stimulate thinking.
The real benefit comes, however, when you start drawing connecting lines between various circles. This can highlight inter-relationships and dependencies that would not be apparent from a linear list.
For example, you might identify the following factors when mind-mapping your supply and manufacturing processes:
In this instance, training emerges as an issue that combines several different factors. It is an example of a previously unsuspected key point that jumps out as a result of mind mapping.
Lateral thinking
Creative thinking is not random but has its own logic – one that allows you to reach a solution not in a straight line, but by zigzagging or jumping all over a problem.
One aspect involves using a form of “provocation”.
Provocation might take any form – thinking of song titles, a cartoon character, what your grandmother said, subconscious thoughts – noting them down and using them to stimulate further, more practical, thoughts. For example, a business consultant listed all the song titles he could think of, one of which was “tea for two”.
When he went back over his list, this song prompted the thought of teatime, which in turn got him thinking about time... and then deadlines. From this he developed the idea for a new consultancy product, one that was highly attractive to clients because it specified a limit – the eight hour audit.
There is clearly a link here with mind mapping. Indeed, most kinds of thinking models overlap and various permutations are possible.
Other techniques
Evaluating ideas
Evaluation becomes easier, especially if there are a number of ideas to consider, if you:
Create acceptance
For a new idea to be accepted in business you often have to overcome a range of barriers including prejudice and bad past experiences. So you need a process to evaluate ideas objectively. It must be:
Indeed, it means analysing every aspect of an idea, so avoid focusing solely on the immediate gains – either in time or organisational terms – when the long-term implications could have wider repercussions.
For example:
Often, compromise is involved, primarily between factors such as cost, quality and time. So the “best” solution may cost too much or involve too long in staff training to implement. On the other hand, quality may be everything and the cost worthwhile.
Your original objectives should help you decide what level of compromise is best.
Once you have evaluated, approved, perhaps tested an idea, you have to plan how to implement it.
Barriers to implementation
Many ideas are stillborn, not because they are bad ideas, but because implementing them threatens to create insurmountable problems. What is worse, however, is that sometimes very simple problems result in ideas being put “on hold” and never pursued. There are a host of excuses for not implementing ideas or putting them off.
You need to be honest and self-aware to stop such things leading to self-fulfilling prophesies.
Barriers during implementation
The main barrier to implementation comes down to communication – or the lack of it. One hears of huge projects collapsing because “no-one thought to ask the drivers”, say, who could have pointed out obvious flaws or who refused to co-operate because they saw it as a threat.
Many people will attempt to sabotage your best ideas if they take a dislike to them for whatever reason.
These are the keys to success:
Effective implementation
It is often said: “proceed with haste, repent at leisure” and this is especially true of implementing new ideas. Time taken at the concept stage is always well spent. Test carefully, analyse your findings and plan in depth.
This written plan should include your objectives, budgets, resources required, timescales and milestones, project review, success criteria, testing and parallel running, communication, security, patenting and so on.
To improve your ability to see and take opportunities:
It is said that the trouble with opportunities is that they so often come disguised as hard work. If it were easy, everyone would do it and gaining any sort of competitive advantage would be impossible.
A continuous review of the possibilities, and a systematic way of prompting, selecting and implementing ideas make the process easier and more certain.
Taking advantage of a new opportunity and profiting from it is always satisfying. This is all the more so if you look back and remember that you made it all happen.
