Best practice in business

Fostering a culture of innovation and creativity in your business can help you stay one step ahead of your competitors. It can ensure that your products and services remain up to date and in line with what your customers need. By following best practices, you will be able to react more quickly to changing markets, customer expectations and needs, and you are likely to see changes coming before others do.

Innovation best practice

Best practice in innovation involves constantly looking at your existing products, processes and procedures to see what improvements you can make. For example, you can choose to innovate through:

• continuous product or process improvement
• product design
• applying new technologies to existing or new products or service

Innovation may come in the form of small changes to existing products or services, or a completely new product, service or process. It can also come from internal sources (such as a product development team) or external sources (such as customer requests or technological advances). See more on continuous improvement for better profitability.

Despite common belief, innovation doesn't always happen spontaneously. Innovative businesses often have strong, inspirational leaders and management, and well-trained and motivated employees. These businesses constantly look at every aspect of the organisation - not just its products and services - and ask the question 'how can it be done better?' 

You should regularly and intentionally plan for innovation in your business.

Learn more about the common approaches to innovation and find seven ways to encourage innovation in your business.