Recently we’ve been blogging about innovation and it’s led to some very interesting conversations. So today we want to talk about realism. Innovation is exciting and can be transformational. It’s also brave, sometimes daft and almost always risky. Not every innovation you try will work out. That’s kinda the deal.

One of the reasons that we bang on so much about working out the minimum viable trial you can do of a new approach is because this limits the risk. No-one should gamble with amounts they can’t afford to lose, and no-one should lose without learning. But the more you try…. and the more you learn…. the better you get at backing the innovations which work for your organisation and your customers.

Keep the faith!

OK, so if you’ve read the previous parts of this blog (link and link) you may have started thinking about how to predict trends, and how to jump off a trend before it crashes. The key to thinking about innovation is flexibility of thought. When you’ve identified a trend, movement or technology which you think might be a great development of what you do, here are some questions to ask yourself in order to apply that:

• What is the minimum I can do which moves me towards this?
• What is the maximum extent to which I can adopt this – what would that mean?
• Is this innovation a vehicle for what I do?
• Can I do the equivalent of what this innovation achieves in my market?
• Can I amend what I do to offer new services or products for people who are early adopters of this innovation?
• Does anything I do solve a problem for people who are part of/users of this innovation?
Try to answer all the questions without pre-judging the answers. It can be surprising what comes from this exercise.

In our last blog (link) we look at bit at early adoption as a route to innovating. This time we want to explain why it is as important to know when to get off the bus as to know when to jump on.

When we experience or see anything, that will trigger a series of associations in our brains. This can mean that as things become more prevalent we have more associations with them – some good, some bad, and that can affect the effectiveness of an approach.

Let’s take an example of a widespread internet approach – the “free-report and squeeze page” combo. You will probably will have experienced this one before – a site offers a free report/eBook/training course/video blog …. all you have to do to get it, is enter your email address. This approach works for a number of reasons, the first is that (provided you think there is value in the freebie) giving your email address feels like a small price to pay, and secondly it works because targeted, elegant email marketing to an interested and engaged prospect can be effective.

However…. this “innovation”, like many others has a half life. Over time, the amount of marketing email we receive as a result of signing up for freebie increases. Even if it doesn’t if the amount of spam we receive increases independently we may associate these emails with this type of marketing. Also… as the number of these approaches proliferate we have a wider number of experiences of this type of selling which we associate with it, some great, some not so great. The result is that overtime the value of the freebie needs to increase before we are willing to part with something which we now understand to be valuable (our email address).

This is a classic case of why we need to know when to get off the bus – as techniques increase in prevalence, we may need to stop using them, just to stay ahead (and protect our brands).

Which previous innovations do you think have now had their day?

We’ve been doing a lot of work with teams recently to help them increase the levels of innovation in their interactions, ideas and services. In one exercise we’ve talked about different types of innovation, and thought it might be an idea to outline 3 of the categories on here, to get you started (or keep you going) with innovating.

People often think that innovating is about inventing brand new stuff, but that is relatively rare…. so we’ll start with an easier way:

Being an Early Adopter. Some of the best, bankable innovation for businesses comes from identifying upcoming trends, new ways of operating and new types of technology. Some people are natural early adopters. But if you aren’t here are some questions to get you thinking:

1. What are the emerging trends and where will you hear about them? Read widely and subscribe to blogs and content outside your specific sphere of operation – look for ideas, technologies and approaches which start to appear regularly. Make time to find out a little bit about emerging trends and how it could affect what you do.
2. Work out what would be involved for you to respond to a trend – what would it cost in terms of time, energy and money? Is it worth a punt?
3. If you aren’t sure, work out whether there are specific advantages for being an early adopter- if you trial something while it is still in development, does that give you a useful advantage over people who come to the party later?
4. Does this innovation depend on volume? Will you get the benefits you need from it before it really takes of, or do you need other people to jump first?

What do you do to keep ahead of the latest trends?

FourSquare (and similar programmes) are, on the face of it, a relatively gimmicky app, which allows people to tell others in the their social network where they’ve been. Even if you aren’t familiar with it, you may well have seen Facebook posts or tweets which say things like: “John is at Nandos, Glasgow”. Business to Consumer businesses often use it well – offering perks and freebies to users who “check in” at their premises and spread the word. Business to business users don’t use it much, if at all. However, we think some are missing a trick.

If you are a large, national brand, people will assume that your product and service are available everywhere. However, if you are a small brand, but one which is still operating nationally, people may not be aware of your reach. It can feel fake, egotistical or even showy-off to check in, in the places you visit as part of your working week, sometimes it might be all of those things. However, our experience, and the experience of clients we’ve been working with recently is that these little reminders of where you are delivering your service, can create new opportunities for our business.

In recent weeks we’ve picked up new clients in Newcastle, Wolverhampton and Glasgow, simply by “checking in” at venues where we are working. All of these leads have come about through a conversation a bit like this:

RubyStar has checked in at Conference Centre, Glasgow.

Hey RubyStar- I didn’t know you worked in Glasgow – you here often?

Hi, yes we have a couple of clients up here.

Give us a shout next time you are up – let’s have coffee

Clients who’ve moved to using a similar approach have also had great results. It’s a simple thing to do – and if you are looking for more work in the places you travel to, might be worth a try.

What do you think? Love it, loathe it? Use it?

We are featured in this guardian piece on Buying Smarter:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/small-business-network/2013/mar/18/saving-money-on-suppliers

When I work with people we are often talking about things that really scare them – selling, telephoning, networking. By arming people with skills and supporting people to practice we help people overcome these fears and often find that when they get started…. there’s no stopping them. This year a chance comment from a client caused me to challenge myself to do something that scares me. And… fates (and one of my colleagues) conspired to put an opportunity in front of me which was both too perfect and too terrifying to ignore. So in February of this year, with no small degree of trepidation I headed down to London to learn all about stand-up comedy.

The course was really enjoyable, but scary at every stage. I surprised myself by which bits I found most tricky, and which things (by comparison) felt more comfortable. And…. in common with what we hear time and time again from clients….. when I took the plunge and survived I was left with a huge sense that if I could do this, no obstacle was insurmountable.

Trying to take my own advice I made the most of the feeling of being invincible and on the way home on the train I set my next challenge, I arranged to do my first stand up comedy performance in front of an audience. As you can imagine, I immediately regretted it, and spent the following weeks quaking in terror, but when the time came, I survived that too. More than survived it, I loved it….. so much so I may even have agreed to do it again. The only problem is that now that performing stand-up comedy is a tiny bit less terrifying than it was at the start of the year, I’m now looking for my next challenge.

So… I’d love your thoughts on what you’ve done that scared you, how it made you feel, what you did next and how you choose your challenges. And… if you have any ideas for my next challenge, let me know!

In keeping with our love of comedy – here’s an article recently published in Funny Women Magazine… http://www.funnywomen.com/magazine/article/770/business-tips-for-comedians

Abundance is one of our values at Ruby Star Associates – for us it means giving generously of our time, sharing ideas and knowledge openly, being collaborative and investing time and energy in helping people to make important things happen. Our experience and data suggest that this investment is more than worth it, and working in a protectionist, minute-counting or suspicious way doesn’t really float our boat.

This week I was reminded of a slightly different definition of Abundance, the one proposed by Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind. He talks about abundance in terms of the relative material abundance that we all experience – the massive availability, accessibility and affordability of huge quantities of stuff which is a feature of the modern world. He argues, (as ever, very convincingly, if you aren’t already a fan, check out some of his work… start with Drive) that this abundance has an impact on how we should shape our organisations. In brief, with so much “stuff” out there, in order to differentiate what you do or sell you need to have more than just something which is effective and affordable – you need to appeal to a higher purpose: aesthetics, spirituality, meaning, even joy. Whilst this definition is different from the one we use, the intention is completely aligned.

Like many other businesses we’ve found that through our pro-bono activities, our exploratory conversations and our investment in the missions and ideas of the great people we’ve met, we’ve learnt loads, made great connections and come across some of the most exciting commercial opportunities. It’s all about balance after all… otherwise it’s just a job. No?