Innovation in Business | How to Increase your Value and Get More Respect

Innovation in business is key to increasing your value in the workplace. It is born from a place of desire. But when does innovation matter?

I came across a YouTube video where Elon Musk was being interviewed. The question came up about firing people.

Elon went on to explain that the number one reason he fires people is due to a lack of innovation.

You can watch this video here:

Innovation in Business

This got me thinking. How do you know if you are in fact being innovative.

Are all ideas considered innovative?

Surely most ideas are a waste of time.

To really understand the importance of innovation in business, you’ve got to look at the value the proposed innovation brings.

As well as this look at the environment that is created due to a lack of innovation.

A Lack of Innovation is Dangerous

When a place of business is lacking in innovation what you’re left with is a stagnant, meaningless and dull workplace.

An employee who is not contributing to innovation is of course contributing to everything we don’t want our workplace to be.

So I have to agree with Elon, this is an excellent reason to both hire someone and fire them.

At the end of the day, much of what we do in society has no intrinsic value. We make things up and value them based on how much money they make and how much control they give us.

What really matters is the feeling and level of connectivity we achieve through what we do.

Innovation connects us deeply to what we are doing. Instead of being a mindless drone going through the motions of your job, you become engaged, switched on and your actions have impact.

Forget about your business or whoever you’re working for. Think of yourself for a moment. Be selfish.

Wouldn’t you love to be an innovative thinker? To be engaged and to know what you are doing has a positive impact on the world.

Such a state of being would fill you with a sense of purpose. You would become more valuable to yourself and get more out of life.

I’ve composed three filters to help guide your innovative ideas so that you can increase your chances of creating innovation in business.

This will increase your value and give you leverage to get more respect and make more money.

True Innovation in Business is:

Increasing Profit

Does your idea directly increase the business’s ability to increase profit by either making more money or saving money?

There isn’t a business in existence that is not going to value an innovative idea that does either of those two things.

You can be sure that businesses that survive the Coronavirus have been forced to be innovative in this way.

As a result, once this period passes, these same businesses will experience a massive surge in growth and profitability once they come out the other-side of this global pandemic.

Those that failed to innovate are dying off.

The competition becomes less and less each day. The survivors will awaken in a new market that they will now be in a position to either dominate or significantly capitalize on like never before.

Examples of how to do this can be through the introduction of fees, lowering expenses, generating new services, or creating new strategies and packages that bundle products and/or services that will increase the value of each customer.

Resilience

Is your innovative idea making the business more resilient?

There are many things that can disrupt operations in a business and create bottlenecks in the workflow.

If you introduce an innovative idea that helps streamline processes, making them more resilient to mistakes and breakdowns you have in fact increased the efficiency of the business.

In my experience, this is often done by introducing protocols that become part of the daily workflow and instill procedures and habits that are in alignment with the goals of the business.

Time

Does your innovative idea save time?

Time has been acknowledged by Warren Buffet as the most precious resource because it is the one thing you can’t get more of.

Time is the great equaliser. We all have the same amount of time in a day. No matter how wealthy or powerful you are, you can’t change that.

This is why if you can bring an innovative idea that frees up more time, you have increased your value in the business.

We see excellent examples of that when people introduce ideas to automate processes.

This is something we will see a lot more of through the development of (AI) Artificial Intelligence.

A business that does not embrace AI will get left behind. Your efforts to work with it and introduce it to the workplace will greatly increase your value either as an employee or a business owner.

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Innovation in business is a key factor in your getting the most out of yourself.

Tony Robbins is quoted as saying “progress is happiness”.

I tend to agree with this sentiment and innovation is a direct way to initiate progress.

Being innovative is like making an investment in yourself by increasing your value which in turn increases your prospects for a better future.

Ask yourself every day you show up “how can I do this better?”.