Three tips for being more innovative in your professional life

As everyone knows, innovation is an extremely important thing for any business – and if you are an entrepreneur, then you no doubt spend a good deal of time and energy thinking about how you could be more innovative at whatever it is you do.

Innovation helps to grab the attention of prospective customers. It helps to differentiate you from your competition. If you’re really on top of your game, and are in the right place at the right time, innovation can even establish and solidify your professional legacy as it did for the likes of Steve Jobs.

Here are just a few tips for being more innovative in your professional life.

Constantly be experimenting

Innovation is driven by experimentation, as it’s essential that you try different things out in order to gauge the results, judge the reaction from your customers and clients, and get a sense of whether or not you are on the right track.

Science, as everyone knows, is driven by experimentation. And all of the innovations that we enjoy today, ranging from our refrigerators to our computers, have only been made possible by the fact that many people have tested many hypotheses out in practice.

Shop deuterium products here if you’re actually a scientist aiming to run lab experiments. If you are an entrepreneur, though, do things like creating prototypes of different products and trialling them with focus groups. Or, experiment with a variety of different marketing campaigns to see which ones get the best reaction.

One thing is for sure: If you never try anything out of the ordinary, you’re never going to be innovative.

Generally speaking, have a bias for action

The people who succeed at innovating things are inevitably those who have a bias for action, and who simply can’t feel comfortable if they allow themselves to settle into a particular routine for a prolonged period of time, and to just “do things by the numbers.”

Of course, you should certainly pay attention to what it is you’re doing, and weigh up the potential consequences before taking action. And when those consequences might be dramatic, you should think long and hard.

As a rule, though – and especially when it comes to decisions that aren’t make or break – you need to get in the habit of actually keeping up momentum and making things happen, rather than planning ad nauseam as a form of procrastination.

Combine customer feedback with your own intuitions about what you would be looking for

One thing that you absolutely need for effective and successful innovation is customer feedback, and a sense of just what the customers are actually after.

If, over the course of your professional life, you’ve picked up very clear signals that the customers do not want a particular “innovation,” then the odds are very low that anything good will happen for you if you try to force that “innovation.”

In addition to listening to customer feedback, though, you should also pay attention to your own intuitions about what you would be looking for, if you had the particular “problem” or “need” that your target customers have. Try to reconcile the two, and you will be well on your way to the kinds of insights that fuel innovation.