Finding Business Opportunities Through Innovation
The process of innovation involves creating something new or improving upon an existing product or service with new ideas. Innovation can mean repurposing an existing product for a new use, inventing a new product to solve an existing problem, or any range of things in between involving new ideas or thought processes. Business opportunities are born every day out of innovation. Learning to use innvoation to find new business opportunities is a highly valuable skill.
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Instructions
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Think about problems you face in your everyday life. What frustrates you? What embarrasses you? Products and services that solve problems or ease embarrassment are generally profitable business ideas. People are always willing to spend money to reduce their chance of being embarassed, and are likely to spend money to make their lives easier. The invention of the remote control was extremely innovative in its time, because it saved people from having to get up each time they wanted to turn the channel on the television. It made their lives simpler.
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Pay attention to the existing products that you use each day. How can you improve upon this product? Is there an additional product or feature that could be used with it to make it better? Identify one product that you think could use improvement and make a list of pros and cons about this product. This might not be your business opportunity, but it will get your brain working creatively and develop your problem-solving skills. The Franklin Covey company used this technique to develop an innovative line of time management and planning products. They saw an opportunity based on improvements that could be made to existing available day planners, and created a new product that incorporated those improvements.
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Meet with like-minded business partners to discuss how you can improve your efficiency. Think about new processes or procedures you could develop that would make your business run more smoothly. The business world is always looking for new and better ways to provide services or bring products to market that reduce costs. If you can develop a way to help an industry save money, you've found a winner. Software developers capitalize on this every day, by developing new software products that can save time and money. TurboTax, for example, and Quickbooks are types of accounting software that the average person can use. Not only does it save time by taking significantly less time than keeping your books by hand, but it also saves money that might have been spent hiring an accountant.
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Attend networking events in your community. Other businesses are constantly developing new products and services. By staying abreast of new developments in your own community, you could be inspired with a bright idea of your own or a spinoff on another product. At the very least, you'll become aware of current trends and be able to identify what types of new ideas are viable in the marketplace.
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Hold regular brainstorming sessions with your staff or with a group of friends or business partners. When you put several minds together to work on the same problem, ingenious ideas can emerge. Write everything down, even ideas that sound crazy. Crazy ideas might be adaptable enough to turn into the next million-dollar idea. Groups of sales and marketing professionals frequently get together to brainstorm new ideas and concepts, and the best advertising campaigns are often created as a result of group synergy.
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Tips & Warnings
Keep a log or journal of all your business ideas. You can refer to it for many years to come. An idea that isn't functional today might be highly profitable ten years from now. There are no bad ideas, only those that require tweaking.
Don't discard ideas if they don't work the first time. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who kept trying after they failed.
