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Inspiration leads to innovation, and innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower, agree? If so, welcome to the new age. An age defined by innovation. The age where your ideas and ingenuity makes a difference. The age where you can stand out with an instinct to innovate.
In this age, your ideas are the pillars that hold the world together, the gears that keep the wheels turning. Your ability to be ingenious and create new things every day help to distinguish you from the person standing next to you.
It is the difference in value that you provide in your business. It is why you are different from the rest. Yes indeed, it’s all about your ability to innovate.
Instinct Defined
Instinct (noun): the fact or quality of possessing innate behavior patterns; a natural propensity or skill of a specified kind.
Like all animals, humans have instincts, genetically hard-wired behaviors that enhance our ability to cope with vital environmental contingencies
Gut instinct, or intuition, is your immediate understanding of something; there’s no need to think it over or get another opinion—you just know. Your intuition arises as a feeling within your body that only you experience. Because of this, trusting your intuition is the ultimate act of trusting yourself (JoinOneLove.org).
However, the ability to create new and amazing things of value doesn’t just come naturally. It doesn’t come by sitting around waiting and it doesn’t come from copying others. For you to be innovative, you’ve got to have the instinct.
It’s the instinct that drives you to want to be different and change things, to want to do something new and valuable. When you see something done incorrectly your mind goes off. In your heart you know that you can do it better. That’s instinct!
You’re starting a business with a little competition, and something tells you to do it differently, that’s the instinct to innovate. It cannot be over-emphasized; you simply need to have it.
How to be Innovative in Business
The innovative instinct is needed in many aspects of life, especially in business. It is one of the keys to running a successful business.
As an aspiring entrepreneur running a startup, you need to continuously generate new ideas to keep your company fresh, energetic, and competitive. It has been proven over time that businesses that are innovative rake in greater revenues annually than those who are not.
Being innovative entails a lot of things; it is not only the generation of new ideas but also the improvement of older ones to beat the latest standards. It has to be efficient, effective, and convenient.
You want to build a computer, make it smaller. If you want to build a car, make it faster. You want to build a website, make it more user friendly and less complicated. Learn to improve on already made ideas, make them yours, and evolve them into something better.
Finding Inspiration for Innovation
In such a fast-moving world, it’s so important to stay on the cutting edge. Your creative ideas of yesteryear probably have very little impact on today’s innovative age. With that said, you’ve realized the importance of finding inspiration for innovation.
Here’s a few ways to source inspiration for innovation:
Open Innovation
This is the use of both internal and external ideas to improve your business operations. It is the combination of ideas brought in from the outside world combined with yours to make something special and enhance the quality and performance of your business.
Disruptive Innovation
This is the creation of an idea or product that is deemed useless and unusable, but later turns out to be an excellent product. So excellent that it displaces top products in the market. An example is the creation of flash drives to displace diskettes in the computer market.
Breakthrough Innovations
This simply means focusing on something entirely new and different from existing products. This involves big and radical ideas that are life-changing and can shake the market. An example is the creation of the social media website Facebook.
Conclusion
Innovations are big! It is what you need to take your business to the next level. To be innovative you don’t have to go all out all the time. You might just need to improve on an existing product to make the next big thing.
You have to grow the innovative instinct in you, allow it to be a part of you. Invest in it. Invest your time, your knowledge, and your resources and you’ll find the results to be extremely satisfying.
