Promoting innovation in a small business

Innovation can play a very important role for a small business. Coming up with new products and services well-tailored to the needs of their customers can help a company with staying competitive in their market. So, the level of innovation at a company can have plenty of financial impacts for it. This can particularly be the case in cutting-edge industries.

Given this, promoting innovation is something that may be a very high priority for some small business owners. There are a range of different innovation-promoting tactics businesses could employ. A recent article on Forbes’ website went over some customer-focused ways of trying to promote innovation within a small business, including:

• Being “obsessed” with one’s customers and their experience.
• Taking great care to understand customer pain points.
• Promoting a customer-focused view throughout the organization.
• Engaging in deeper customer inquiries to better understand customer experience and needs.
• Incorporating customer demonstrations and customer feedback into the prototyping process.

What things would you recommend for companies when it comes to trying to drive the innovation of products and services that will resonate with their customer base?

Now, when it comes to innovation within their company, promoting it is not the only thing that can be of great importance for a small business owner. So too can protecting the innovations their company has developed. How protected a company’s innovations are can impact how much the company is able to fully enjoy the benefits of such innovations.

For some innovations, patents can play an important role in keeping them protected. There are a variety of factors that can impact whether a company could seek out a patent for a given innovation and how much the patent process would be likely to help a company with protecting their innovation. So, after their company develops a new innovation, a small business owner may want to promptly talk with an experienced patent lawyer about whether pursuing a patent would be likely to help them with their innovation-protection goals.