It is easy to work in your business and be doing the same thing day after day. If you recognise this, now is a good time to inject new ideas into your business. The process is easy and your results can be invaluable.

Define your objective

1. Agree a focus for your new ideas: to improve your marketing, to solve a production problem, to present your products better, to reduce your wastage. Then polish this to make your objective tightly defined, including quantity and time measures: to reduce the off-cut materials from production by 50% within 3 months.

Go for volume in innovations

2. Recreate an environment where you have been able to think freely in the past: some find a quiet walk helps, others say their best ideas come to them when driving, and working with your team over a light meal can also work.

3. The best way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas so the more ideas you create, the better. Without evaluating them, write all the ideas down as soon as you think of them so you do not lose them before the next idea comes.

4. Turn off your internal filters, do not judge the worth of your thoughts at this stage (because criticism kills free thought) and just let your fresh ideas flow freely.

Spot your constraining assumptions then break them

5. Now start at the top of your list of ideas and

• Generate the opposites of each idea and add it to your list.
• Pick out several ideas that could form components of a bigger idea and see how many combinations you can list from them.
• Look for extremes (high, low, big, small) and use their inversions to create more ideas on your list.

6. Try someone elses perspective on a specific problem: What would Elvis Presley have done? And Tommy Cooper? Or your next-door neighbour? Maybe Jack Welch (neutron Jack, CEO of General Electric)? What ideas would they have?

Build the vision to produce change

7. When you have produced several pages of ideas, move into evaluation mode and select ideas and parts of ideas that you could use.

8. Develop these ideas, make them achievable and sensible, flesh out their details and work out how to implement them.

9. Now create an action list of your polished ideas, ranking them by the control you have over the implementation of each idea.

Where you cannot control the idea, do not discard it, put it onto a pending list where it can wait until your circumstances change: good ideas gain value by waiting for their right time.

For the ideas on your action list, set a timescale and budget for each and act on them.

You can use this innovation process in a variety of ways: on your own; if you have staff, the process might take longer but be more fun as a team effort; you could also start steps 1 to 4 on your own, do steps 5 and 6 with some colleagues and then finish steps 7 through 9 on your own again.

Following this process, you should find that some ideas can be used immediately and at least one of those will give you an immediate pay back for the effort you have invested in thinking new thoughts.

Adrian Pepper

Adrian Pepper specialises in working with the owners and directors of small businesses as they improve their performance and grow their income.

Choosing to work with entrepreneurs who are committed to growing their companies, Adrian offers rich experience drawn from a 30-year career in middle and senior management in blue chip companies, an MBA, an engineering degree and an OCN Advanced Certificate in Coaching.

Adrian has lived and worked in Deal, Kent since 1991, building up a broad network in the business community. He writes a column in the KM Kentish Gazette and other newspapers on subjects that interest the sort of people who start and grow small businesses. He also publishes a podcast twice a month to help small businesses to grow. Rrecently this has grown into speaking engagements and team training for business seminars.