What Innovation Means For Small Businesses

Wall Street Journal have been looking at innovation and small business...

What Innovation Means For Small Businesses

Posted by Kelly Spors

Editor’s note: On Mondays, we’ll be interviewing 2008 Top Small Workplaces winners about their companies and the unique workplace practices that help make them successful. You can read the full 2008 Top Small Workplaces package here. You can also nominate a business for Top Small Workplaces 2009 here.

The ability to innovate and smartly execute new ideas will make or break many businesses in the future, as we noted recently. But many small companies don’t know what that means – or how to create that magic spark.

Jump Associates of San Mateo, Calif., consults Fortune 500 companies like Hewlett-Packard, Target and Procter & Gamble on how to bolster innovation in the workplace and identify new channels of growth. We spoke with Chief Executive Dev Patnaik about the role innovation should play in a small business, what it means exactly, and the common mistakes. Here are edited excerpts.

WSJ: Why should small companies care about being innovative?
The fact is the nature of work has changed in the last 25 years – it’s gotten a lot more complex. If you think back to the ’70s, you’d be a good manager if you knew how sales were in your Tulsa office compared with some other office. Now people have Microsoft Excel to help manage that. That’s not the hard part anymore. The challenge now is being able to answer much more complex, nebulous questions like, what can your company do to stand out compared to your competitors?

WSJ: What mistakes do small businesses typically make when they try to come up with new ideas?
For one, they become enamored with the charismatic visionaries out there like Richard Branson at Virgin or Steve Jobs at Apple. Those people are very interesting, but they’re great anomalies. If you’re not Steve Jobs, a lot of it doesn’t pertain to you. So they focus on individuals instead of companies. They also read about an interesting practice and don’t realize they’re kind of misapplying something that isn’t appropriate for them. Or they do superficial improvements. They think, let’s go on a team trip or buy a foosball table. Superficial goofiness is not innovation. Innovation is creating value for people and giving it to them in really surprising and compelling ways. It’s about empathy; it’s about creativity and coming up with really creative ways to solve problems and doing so systematically.

WSJ: What are some of the things companies can do to be more innovative?
The good news is small companies are in a much better position than most large companies. Fortune 500 companies have complex systems – they’re trying to replicate a lot of traits that small businesses already have.
From our perspective innovation is three things: empathy, creativity and execution – and you have to have all three. Empathy is about getting employees out in the real world. If you work for a company that makes kitchen tools, you should go hang out with the chefs that use kitchen tools.
As for creativity, everybody has great ideas but they often fail to share them. A lot of it comes down to safety. If you just get people to feel safe about offering up their opinions, you’ll get a lot of good ideas. For example, at Jump we have a “no zinger” policy that bans people from insulting each other or criticizing each others’ ideas. There are little things you can do like that just to make people feel safe. I think especially at a small business, leaders can also ask provocative questions – something like, “Give me an idea that really scares me.” Ultimately people measure to what they think they’re being measured on. There may be some really wild and crazy options that are worth implementing.

Has your company taken steps to boost innovation among employees? What’s worked and what hasn’t?

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