7 Ways To Innovate And Deliver Unique Value To Your Customers

Small business owners need to be ready to identify new opportunities, react rapidly to changing market conditions and remain competitive especially in tough economic times. Because of their size, small businesses can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and implement new ways of doing business. Here are seven types of innovation that a small business may use to bring unique value to their customers.

1. Market driven innovation
A tight connection with their marketplace and close relationships with their customers help small businesses understand customer needs, identify new opportunities, and bring new products or services to the marketplace quickly.

2. Research driven innovation
The use of science and technology to bring new products to the marketplace. Unless the research is driven by an identified need in the marketplace, this type of innovation typically produces products which aren’t immediately connected to solving a specific point of pain. Small business owners are generally very eager to experiment and improvise.

3. Service driven innovation
Adding a service in order to make it easier to do business or use an existing product. This may not be considered as a new offering and may be packaged with existing offering to improve the way it performs.

4. Competitive driven innovation
This is innovation that is a reaction to what competition is doing in the market. Because small businesses can quickly adapt to changing market conditions this gives them the ability to be able to react to competition quickly.

5. Internal skill set driven
This happens when a small business has workers who are skilled in certain specialty areas and can quickly develop solutions to problems observed in the marketplace which may or may not be directly related to the current product set.

6. Overhead driven
Based on the availability of equipment and the need to get a good return on investment, a small business may try to either use a piece of equipment or subcontract it out thus creating a new service or product in it arsenal.

7. Waste by-product driven
There may be by products of a process which can be used to build a new and different product. A small furniture company making a new piece of furniture strictly from waste pieces of wood.

Every small business should have an innovation plan and can use these seven areas as a guide for solving marketplace problems and bringing unique value to customers.