IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

Business innovation is the creating and successfully applying of new ideas within your organization. This could be provided in the form of a major breakthrough such as creating and bringing of a new product or service to the market, or as series of smaller innovations such as finding better or more efficient ways of working and becoming more profitable. Innovation is a creative process and some business ideas which need the investment of time, energy and money in order to develop and deliver results. Developing of the culture of innovation can be vital to your business's long-term success and profitability. We would like to provide here the information of the importance of new business ideas and creating an atmosphere within which innovation can thrive.

There are several reasons why the generation of new ideas can be critical to your business success. Although every organization will have its own priorities and sector-specific issues to balance, businesses that fail to innovate run the risk of losing ground to competitors, losing key staff, or simply operating inefficiently. Innovation can be a key differentiator between market leaders and their rivals.

Innovation can help you to discover what opportunities exist now, or are likely to emerge in the future. Successful businesses not only respond to their current customer or organizational needs, but often anticipate future trends and develop an idea, product or service that allows them to meet this future demand rapidly and effectively. Innovation will help you stay ahead of your competition as markets, technologies or trends shift.

Innovation is not only about designing a new product or service to sell, but can also focus on existing business processes and practices to improve efficiency, find new customers, cut down on waste and increase profits.

Constantly innovating and improving business practices is also likely to help you attract better staff members and retain more of your existing staff - something which is crucial to the long-term health and performance of your business.

Consumers often see innovation as something that adds value to a company or to its products. Used properly, innovation can give you a commercial advantage - especially in saturated or rapidly shifting markets.

Your customers may even be willing to pay more for your well-designed, novel and innovative product or service, rather than choosing a cheaper, but less exciting rival.

There are different types of innovation. Your business can take a number of different approaches to innovation. Usually, this will depend on how much time and money you have available and what your business strategy is. These approaches can be part of a continuous cycle or employed on a more ad-hoc basis, depending on your needs. Incremental innovation

Incremental innovation focuses on making modest improvements to existing processes, products or services.

This could be anything from tightening up an existing workflow by automating some of the process, to improving your website in order to make self-service easier, thus reducing the number of customers coming to you through more costly and time-consuming channels.

Radical innovation

Radical innovation involves creating a completely new process or product in response to a market need or opportunity.

Radical innovations tend to come about as a result of careful research and development into a specific issue or problem, and frequently make use of new technology to solve them. These kinds of innovations are often seen as 'breakthrough' innovations, some of which can change the entire way an organization operates and, on occasion, can result in a new product or service that impacts an entire market sector.

Combining radical and incremental innovation

Sometimes the best approach can be to combine radical and incremental innovation. An example of this would be to develop a totally new process to produce and manage an existing product or service. Developing an idea to bundle several products together is also innovation.

This could involve anything from outsourcing part of your manufacturing process, which was previously done in-house, to moving your IT system onto a more flexible platform, such as cloud, to enable work-from-home arrangements or to help employees respond more effectively while on the move.

Another way to make the most of innovation is to become a design-led business and to integrate design into your daily operations. Design can help you unlock valuable opportunities, either by generating new ideas or by improving a product or service to better suit your customers' needs.

Design can also help strengthen and streamline your business processes, and help you understand any weakness that may exist within your supply chain.

Technology has a vital role to play in any modern workplace and can make a huge difference to the way your business operates, and how well your staff carries out their tasks. These days, an online presence is also expected by customers and therefore is an essential component for businesses.

New technology can not only speed processes up, or allow flexible new ways of working and can often save you time and money.

There are several ways that an innovative business can make use of technology. For instance, you could use new technology to:

• manage, develop and retain ideas and internal knowledge

• communicate and interact more effectively within an organisation

• create more environmentally friendly and sustainable business practices.

In order to understand whether a new technology could help your business, you should review the technology you are presently using and assess how well existing systems work with your current and future business requirements.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is using your existing IT systems, and what are they doing?

• How efficient are your current operations?

• Are there any bottlenecks which cause problems?

• Are staff getting stuck on less important tasks?

• Are you duplicating effort between different departments?

• Are there ways of working faster or tasks that could be automated?

• Is your current technology going out of date or causing compatibility issues?

• Are your business needs or processes likely to change in the near future?

Once you have considered these questions, you should have a clear picture of any issues that could be solved by introducing new technology into your workplace.

If you have started to innovate, it is vital to monitor the performance of your new business ideas to find out if they are delivering benefits. Monitoring includes settingspecific goals and targets and measuring the performance of new ideas. In most cases, new ideas or innovations come about to address specific needs or issues. As a result, they should either improve or enhance an existing product, process or service, or be entirely new because of the research and development (R&D) you have undertaken around a new trend or opportunity. Always make sure your targets are SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. No matter how the idea has come about, it is important to measure how well it is performing once it has been implemented. How you choose to do this will depend on the nature of the innovation and your own organization. However, there are some simple calculations you can use, including:

• R&D expenditure as a percentage of revenue

• the cost of non-financial resources (including time and people)

• new product sales (less than 2 years) as a percentage of sales

• the percentage of profits from the new products/services

• the number of months to develop and launch a product (speed to market)

• staff satisfaction and performance

• customer feedback and satisfaction with your business.

You may find it useful to benchmark your business against other similar businesses in your industry or sector, in order to try and understand the impact and benefits of your innovation. Benchmarking against rivals could also help you see whether there are any goals and targets your competitors use that could similarly benefit your business.

When your goals and targets are met, you should consider additional or improved targets to help get the most out of your idea. When your goals and targets are not met, you should review and solve any specific issues which may be hampering your success, or consider whether your initial targets were unrealistic and should be revised.

You should also examine the longer-term benefits of innovation, as well as the impact it can have in the short term. Some innovations can take time to make a positive impact on your business operations. This is why including innovation as part of your business planning is essential. Having a business plan will help you develop new ideas that meet the strategy and vision for your business.

If your idea starts to fail, or you identify an issue through analysis, consider using a combination of creative and analytical thinking to find a solution, so that innovation itself plays a part in resolving the problem.

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