Think, Invent, Innovate, and Profit more.
About this article
The key to sustainable business success depends on the three essential abilities, and they are “Think”, “Invent”, and “Innovate.”
We will start this article with the dictionary definitions of “Think”, “Invent”, and “Innovate.”
As per dictionary definition:
Think means “direct one’s mind towards someone or something; use one’s mind actively to form connected ideas.”
Invent means “Create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of.”
Innovate means “make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.”
Suppose you are starting a business or owning or managing an established company; to maintain sustainable growth, companies need to think, invent and innovate as businesses internal and external environments evolve.
Without the three capabilities, companies will eventually fail even if they have been successful in the past—examples of successful companies before but no longer include Kodak and blockbuster video rentals.
Business context
In this article, we will explain what we mean by think, invent and innovate within the context of business success.
Towards the end of this articles, we will introduce and invite you to a Modern Business Blueprint approach.
The Modern Business Blueprint approach is something we are pioneering to help business leaders think, invent, innovate, and take their business to the next level of growth by taking their ideas systematically to the stage of making money.
To explain why thinking, inventing and innovating plays a significant role in business success. Here, we introduce you to a three-dimensional Venn diagram. At the centre, where the intersection of all three dimensions, you have the customer’s wants.
Customer is the focal point of any business. Every business serves one or more customer segments; therefore, companies should know their customers and their wants —an inadequate understanding of their customers and what their desires will eventually lead to failure, if not sooner
Now let’s look at the main three dimensions of a business.
What company’s offer to its customers (Products and Services)?
The first is to consider what products and services the company offer to its customers and prospects. Secondly, consider how the company differentiate their products and services from their competitor’s offers.
Ideally, a company’s products and services are something that customers want. Some businesses make the mistakes of offering what they believe customer’s need instead of providing what their customer wants.
Focusing on customer’s need instead of customers’ desires will lead to failure unless the company has a marketing campaign or plan to “educate” their prospects that the company believes about their prospects’ needs are actually what their prospects want.
In a “nutshell”, – the company convince their prospect’s to want more and more of what it is selling to grow successfully.
For example, a patient seeking treatment for a headache may want a tablet to relieve them from their symptoms. Still, a GP may know better and direct them for more investigation or in other ways than prescribing the pills the patient wanted in the first place. In this situation, it is easier for the GP to convince the patient as there is already an inherent trust, but this may not be the case in other businesses and will depend on the faith and the relationship levels with the customer. Therefore, it may need more effort to convince the customers.
Value Chain (How a company make and deliver its offer?)
This second dimension is about the company’s internal value chain. The value chain focuses on how to build and distribute the proposed value proposition to potential customers.
Here several processes and activities such as production, distribution, purchasing, finance, marketing, customer relations and many more come into play.
Generally, managing the internal value chain on a day-to-day basis is referred to as “operations.” and involves many processes and activities and resources and capabilities of those resources.
Successful orchestration of all functions, activities and resources is the purpose of “operations”, which forms companies internal value chain.
Value model – “Show Me the Money”.
The third dimension is the value model, and it deals with how to make money from the business.
The purpose of the value model is to “show the company the money” flow, including the timing of the flow.
The value model explains why a company or a project within a company is viable.
Value models and the types of analysis include cost-benefit analysis, review and forecast, profit and loss, and balance-sheet analysis, and other forms of “what ifs?” studies such as simulation and optimisation studies.
In essence, value models help bring together cost structure, pricing models, revenue collection mechanisms and essentially answer the fundamental question of any company; – How to make money with that business.
Think, Invent, Innovate
Now that we have a familiar business context to discuss “thinking”, “Inventing”, and “being innovative”, let us review how these acts help move a company to the next level of growth.
“Thinking” is all about developing an intimate understanding of the customer wants and needs. Thinking processes also involve researching, interviewing, observing, and interpreting the data and information you gather to better the company.
“Inventing” is about using thoughts and ideas to develop new and innovative products and services that do not exist now to differentiate company’s offers within the market they serve.
“Innovation” is all about developing a competitive internal value chain, meaning optimised functioning of all deployed resources, activities within a well-coordinated process. The purpose of optimising the internal value chain is to deliver financial viability and more profit.
The modern business blueprint
The modern business blueprint approach we have developed is designed to help business leaders think, invent, and innovate systematically.
The Modern Business Blueprint uses proven methods and techniques that have helped many organisations in the past. The blueprint aims to fast-track business success without wasting time researching and leaders going through the learning curve themselves.
Your invitation
So, no matter what stage in the business you are in, if you are looking to take your company to the next level, we invite you to connect with us to help you achieve your company’s growth goals faster.
