3 ways to stay INNOVATIVE

Kia and I are in Portland, Oregon attending The Storyline Conference sponsored and featuring author Don Miller. I look forward to sharing more with you about the conference. I thought I would share a few articles from before the true beginning of The Collective.

Innovation is tough. Truly being different, unique, inventive is not easy. Sometimes you can stumble into it once or twice, but you don’t luck into consistent innovation. That’s why what companies like Apple do is so amazing. On a yearly (or more) basis they develop and release products that are genre bending.

So how do they do it? How do companies stay innovative and on top of the heap with equally or more creative competition all around them? How do you do it?

1. Remember your core. On a regular basis great companies go back to what made them who they are. The book Good to Great by Jim Collins calls this the Hedgehog Principle. Know what you’re great at (your core), and protect that at all costs. Nearly 15 years ago, when Steve Jobs returned as CEO to Apple, he said as much. “Our customers want to know who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for? Where to we fit in this world?” Your clients and customers what to know the same thing. What is the core of your business? What makes you tick? Answering this question helps you to consistently stay innovative because it frees you focus on your core, and drop the things that slow you down.
2. Apply creative thinking across the entire scope of your business. Apply innovation to your pricing, sales, management, marketing. So much of our time as photographers gets taken by creating new products, filters, layers, and Photoshop tricks to develop fresh imagery. But have you applied this type of thinking to the entirety of your business? Applying the same approach to your business as you do to your art helps you stay fresh. We’ve learned from Apple that the best businesses sell their pricing as much as they do their products.
3. Continue to learn and grow. Learning new information causes you to look at your business from a different perspective. It makes you ask, “How can we do this differently? More efficient? Better?” Google allows their engineers to allocate 20% of their time to personal projects – that’s one full day a week! Our good friends at Animoto give their entire staff 1-2 weeks each year to do the same. Learning and creating for the simple purpose to just learn and create stokes innovation.

Want to know a little more about what Steve Jobs thinks about the importance of knowing your core values, and the importance of branding around this? Check out this video from the late 90’s when Apple was just beginning its re-emergence.