Brainzooming questions, tools, and exercises come from diverse sources. We often imagine them from reading between the lines of articles describing innovation successes. We’ll digest how organizations ranging from corporations to entrepreneurs and nonprofits are pursuing innovative growth. Then, we envision lists of questions and prompts that could have triggered their innovative strategies.
The January issue of Feast Magazine, which “broadens the conversation about food and engages a large, hungry audience of food-lovers” around the Midwest published its Rising Stars issue. Feast profiled twenty-four “culinary creatives making their mark.” Perusing snapshots of food innovators screamed out to me: take notes and describe the strategies these individuals are using, although not typically calling out in the article.
94 Ideas to Imagine Innovative Growth Strategies
From my notes, here are ninety-four innovation and growth strategies these emerging food stars are employing.
No matter your industry or company size, you can dive into this list to generate potential ideas for innovation and growth. Ask for each prompt: What would doing this look like in our organization?
Go beyond listing one idea per prompt; use each prompt to generate five-to-ten ideas. You can select prompts from the categories where your business most needs an innovative jumpstart. Alternatively, you can select them at random to surprise yourself with the ideas they suggest.
Have fun. More importantly, take advantage of investing fifteen minutes to do some new thinking for your organization’s innovative future.
Branding and Marketing
- Create your equivalent of a pop-up version of your brand
- Go back to your brand’s traditional customer favorites
- Increase the customization in what you do
- Shift even more of what you do online
- Challenge the stigmas attached to your market and brand
- Share the newest things you do on Instagram
- Collaborate with other brands in your market
- Compete for third-party awards
- Host more events
- Tell more stories behind what you do
- Only offer things where you have a strong story behind them
- Don’t limit yourself to one cultural tradition
- Make your brand and customer experience fun for everyone
- Offer free giveaways to individuals who will use and share stories about your products
- Make your brand more cheerful
- Increase your brand (and market’s) approachability
- Get closer to the roots of your business
- Open a retail store
- Improve your facilities and capabilities
Strategy
- Don’t do any of the common things your competitors do
- Give up on all your plans that aren’t working
- Focus on the things that have generated the most momentum recently
- Tuck your brand under another brand to help you grow and develop more quickly and fully
- Refuse to give up on your original vision
- Repurpose the things that are working for you
- Decide to expand dramatically then do everything to make it happen
- Pay attention to how things used to be done and bring the best lessons forward
- Focus on the why underlying what you do
- Make sure you have a clear, well-understood mission and follow it with a passion
- Start a side business
- Start with a scaled-down version to develop the proof-of-concept for what you ultimately want to do
- Expand your long-term view
- Plan less and do more things in the moment
- Seek out grants to fund what you do
Customers and Experience
- Cultivate a more loyal more customer base
- Offer more types of customer experiences
- Give even more focus to your customers
- Give prospects the opportunity to sample what you do
- Let customers reserve what they want
- Solicit, listen to, and do something with customer feedback
- Show more interest in your customers (and everyone else who might be interested in your brand)
- Don’t overlook friends as prospects for what you do
- Consciously appeal to very different tastes among customers
- Work on creating camaraderie inside and around your business
- Create an enjoyable process for employees and customers
- Ask about fan favorites and heavy up on them
- Make it easy for newcomers (employees and customers) to succeed
Personal Development
- Work harder
- Approach your responsibilities as a solopreneur
- Reach out to your mentors for ideas and help
- Focus on where you have the most career experience
- Amp up your passion about what you do
- Focus your efforts on something you’d want to do forever
- Incorporate your hobbies into what you do
- Make everything yourself
- Be more perfectionistic about what you deliver, and let people know about that
- Take time to talk with your collaborators and share ideas
- Incorporate childhood lessons into what you do
Learning
- Watch YouTube videos for free training for you and your team
- Research more about what you do and could do
- Drown yourself in the fundamentals of what you do
- Make sure you are learning new things every day
- Keep a journal to record your learnings
- Provide the training for everyone to be successful with changes in your business
- Invest hours in R&D every week
- Look over all the books in your market space
- Always be learning from your customers
Innovation
- Experiment more with new offerings and specials
- Cultivate a broader market environment that helps both you and your competitors
- Go all-in on creative ideas
- Quit playing by your industry’s familiar rules
- Make up your own rules
- Take a road trip for inspiration and to discover needed assets
- Improve how to ease transitions within your business
- Challenge your marketplace’s views of what’s acceptable, normal, or safe
Community Building
- Feature other important people and brands in your ecosystem
- Partner with nonprofit organizations to do something good for them
- Create a network within and around your brand
- Actively support minority-owned businesses
- Encourage new entrepreneurs to start their own businesses
- Increase your brand’s generosity
Products and Services
- Offer DIY versions of what you sell
- Try new combinations of what you offer
- Frequently change what you offer
- Make sure everything you do is complete and will work the first time
- Test all the new things you are planning to introduce
- Don’t overlook a single detail
Team Development
- Feature your brand’s experts
- Get some part-time people involved to extend you (and your team)
- Bring people with no experience into your business to learn from their fresh perspectives and develop them
- Do more for your employees than most employers would
Expanding Diversity
- Increase the diversity of your experience
- Expand diversity within your team
- Merge different ways of doing things into unique combinations
