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Archive for the 'Creative' Category

100 INSPIRING IDEAS TO MAKE YOU A CHALLENGER

Published by Business Link on 28 January, 2010 in Creative and News & Opportunities • 0 Comments

Inspirational ideas have been gathered from 100 of the South West’s most exciting companies to help you drive your business forward in 2010.

Each of the 100 displays the type of drive, passion and innovative approach that has enabled them to go head-to-head with their market leaders and succeed despite fierce competition.

They are sharing these powerful and motivational ideas through the 100 South West Challenger campaign, which was launched on January 25 by Business Link in partnership with the South West RDA (Regional Development Agency).

Business Link’s advisers will be analysing these lessons and providing practical advice which, as owner-managers, you can use in your own business.

With trading conditions this year likely to remain challenging, you will need to outthink your competitors – and these 100 South West Challengers will show how.

The campaign will give you no-nonsense advice, delivered in easy-to-understand language with tips on essential topics from marketing to innovation, skills and finance.

The 100 South West Business Challengers campaign will run for 100 working days until Friday, 11 June. Each day a new Challenger profile will be uploaded onto the Business Link website.

The campaign is being supported by Northcliffe Publishing, which owns  28 newspapers and numerous websites throughout the South West, as well as BBC radio, television and online across the region.
The campaign will focus on themes including innovation, marketing, people, environment, focus, customer service, international trade, finance and starting in business.

Challenger companies will be interviewed and profiled as part of the campaign. The 100 Challengers will inspire the South West’s 219,000 small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) whose success is crucial to the future of the region.

They employ more than half the workforce – nearly 1.6 million people between them – so they play a vital role in driving the economy forward and contribute greatly to its growth, prosperity and superior quality of life.

The 100 South West Challengers campaign is not about easy solutions. The South West RDA and Business Link are determined to inspire and encourage enterprise among the region’s small and growing firms, building on its proud tradition of innovation and creativity. But this can only be achieved by working in true partnership.

South West RDA Chief Executive, Jane Henderson, said: “We are determined to encourage all companies to succeed, which is why we are delighted to be working with Northcliffe and Business Link in this unique partnership.”

Business Link, as the independent gateway to business support across the South West, is committed to helping small and medium-sized firms through the current challenging economic conditions.

Phil Smith, Business Link Chief Executive said: “Small businesses across the South West need to put innovation and creativity at the core of their operations. We have 100 examples of successful companies of all sizes which have done just that.”

Follow the daily challenger profiles on our website www.businesslink.gov.uk/southwest/challengers or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/blsw

Entrepreneurship Quotes

Published by Business Link on 20 October, 2009 in Creative and Top Tips • 2 Comments

Learn the secrets of success with top tips from some of the world’s great entrepreneurs; then suggest your own.

It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week next month, so let’s fire up the entrepreneurial spirit with tips from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. And if you have your own top tip or favourite quote – please share it below.

“The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible: Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible about tactics.” Jeff Bezos

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” Henry Ford

“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity… It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practised.” Peter Drucker

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” Steve Jobs

“Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.” Benjamin Franklin

“Lifelong learning is vital.” Bill Gates

“Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is co-ordinating those who work with me and aiming their efforts at a certain goal.” Walt Disney

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” Sam Walton

“Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.” Anita Roddick

“A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.” Richard Branson

“You don’t hear things that are bad about your company unless you ask. It is easy to hear good tidings, but you have to scratch to get the bad news.” Thomas Watson

There’s a way to do it better – find it. Thomas A. Edison

What’s your favourite quote? Or do you have your own top tip for fellow entrepreneurs? Please comment on this article or email us and we’ll publish your thoughts for you.

Download top tips

Entrepreneurship

Published by Business Link on 20 October, 2009 in Creative, Management & Leadership and Strategy & Operations • 0 Comments

What it means. Why it’s important. How to do it better.

What it means

Global Entrepreneurship Week defines enterprise and entrepreneurship as follows: 
“Being enterprising is the ability to respond to change, take risks, to innovate and to generate and implement new ideas and new ways of doing things… The package of skills we use to describe enterprise are: the ability to assess and manage risk, creativity, resourcefulness, business understanding and planning, communication skills, teamwork skills, leadership skills, self-efficacy, and self-reliance.” Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Anyone who starts, leads or develops a business is an entrepreneur – to some degree. But while some entrepreneurs may excel at all of the above traits, others may need to focus on developing their entrepreneurial skills.

Why it’s important

It’s difficult to look at the above collection of skills and traits and not agree that most are vital to business development and success. This fact alone makes entrepreneurship important. In addition to these tangible skills there’s also an entrepreneurial spirit within some people that inspires them to create businesses and push things forward through development, change and innovation. This spirit drives entrepreneurs.

The term entrepreneurship neatly defines this combination of skills, talents, traits and attitudes – all of which are valuable to business success. In practical terms this is what makes the term important. If nothing else it provides a checklist of ‘things to get better at’ for those who want to develop their businesses and become great entrepreneurs.

How to do it better

Develop yourself
As Bill Gates puts it, “lifelong learning is vital”. Entrepreneurship begins with business owners and leaders; if they learn to become better at their day jobs – and at entrepreneurship itself – they can build more successful businesses. Open up to developing yourself through new experiences, learning and training.

Engage with your people
Innovation, communication and teamwork are key traits of entrepreneurship. And innovation itself relies on the creativity and talents of people. So why not use your leadership, communication and team working skills to develop better ways to engage with your people and encourage them to become more innovative? In our innovation series we defined some key steps to innovation: setting an innovation agenda and communicating it with key people; engaging employees to come up with ideas; and enabling people to implement good ideas by removing barriers to innovation.

Rationalise risk
Most entrepreneurs are familiar with risk; it’s invariably part of starting a new business. But as time passes and your business becomes stable and successful it could become harder to pursue ideas which risk what you’ve achieved. Rationalising risk, and at the right times accepting it, are key traits of innovation and entrepreneurship. What if you or a colleague conjured up a brilliant but risky idea? How can you better manage risk in order to pursue great ideas?

For more information on Enterprise and Entrepreneurship visit Enterprise UK and Global Enterprise Week.

More info – Guide to successful entrepreneurship

More info – Guide your entrepreneurial personality

Simplify

Published by Business Link on 20 October, 2009 in Creative, HR & People Development and News & Opportunities • 0 Comments

Three places to look for opportunities to remove difficulty and create a better business and an easier life.

If you can simplify something without reducing the value it offers, you can win. Win customers, profits, or free time. But how often do you stop to ask the question: Could things be simpler?

The dictionary definition of simple: “easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty”. In most businesses there are numerous opportunities to remove difficulty and thus make things more easily understood or done. To identify opportunities for simplification, try looking across the following three dimensions:

1. Customer
Examine customer interactions, experiences and journeys – such as how consumers learn about your products or services and how they progress through awareness, interest, desire and action. Can you make such experiences easier or more accessible? And could you simplify purchase or after-sales processes such as returns or customer feedback? Also question your products or services; consider how a product’s use or function could be made simpler, or how you could improve a service to make it quicker and easier.

2. Business
Can you make ‘back-end’ business tasks or processes less difficult and thus more efficient and effective? This could mean examining tasks or processes to identify steps which could be removed, shortened or improved. Or you could use technology to make things quicker and easier, for example, by automating data backups or other administrative processes. Opportunities to simplify could exist anywhere in the back-end of your business, from the way you develop and produce products or services to the way you communicate with colleagues or suppliers, or administer your finances, IT systems or payroll. Look everywhere.

3. Personal
You could choose to start more simply by looking at yourself. How could you make your own working life simpler? Look at what you do and challenge the things that present difficulty, those things which are not so easily understood or done. Numerous opportunities might emerge, from training yourself to better understand complex tasks, to simplifying how you organise your days, to more straightforward improvements such as simplifying the way you manage your inbox or meetings. It’s these small opportunities to simplify that can add up to make all the difference. In every case it’s about first identifying points of difficulty and then conjuring up ways to make things simpler and easier.

Protect value

Protecting value is fundamental to successful simplification. If part of a product, service, task or process provides value and you remove, shorten, or mess with it in some way that reduces value, you are not simplifying – you are making things worse. It’s similar to clever cost-cutting, which seeks to cut only those costs which offer no customer or business value, but here we aim to save not just money but time and stress levels.

In essence, simplification is about asking one simple question: Could things be made simpler, without diluting value?

More info – Guide use innovation to grow your business

More info – Guide how to identify new business opportunities

Co-creation

Published by Business Link on 20 August, 2009 in Creative • 0 Comments

Henry Ford once said that his customers could buy a Model T motor car in any colour they wanted, so long as it was black. Such thinking emerges from a view that company, not customer, knows best. Skip forward to today and you can design a pair of trainers with a myriad of colour combinations and design features. Such user-empowerment turns Ford’s attitude on its head and places the customer firmly in control.

Cooperating with customers has indeed become more popular. trendwatching.com describes the trend as “the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with experienced and creative consumers”. And CK Prahalad – who according to global ranking Thinkers 50 is “the most influential living business thinker in the world” – says that when creating products, services and experiences “we need two joint problem solvers, not one”. He calls this “important idea” the process of “co-creation”.

Broadly speaking, co-creation has two sides. First is the collaboration between company and customers in the product or service design process. Second is the opportunity to provide ways for customers to personalise products or services in order to satisfy their unique wants and needs. Both these processes have benefited from new technologies; the former thanks to ever-increasing ways to communicate with customers, the latter thanks to technologies which allow for personalisation of products or services.

An example of co-creation in product design is Lego, a company which has co-created products through close cooperation with customers. The NHS is also working with customers to build co-created services which satisfy customer needs and offer improved experiences. In terms of product personalisation the Adidas customisable trainer example reflects the use of modern web and production technologies. And finally, a well-known example of service personalisation is iGoogle, which offers a highly customisable user experience.

Companies have of course been collaborating with customers for years, through marketing approaches such as research or focus groups. But today the scope for engaging in dialogue has widened. For example, numerous companies, such as the company behind the popular video game Call of Duty, are using Twitter to obtain suggestions and product insights which can immediately guide development. And countless other companies regularly tap into user communities or social networks for ideas, inspiration and feedback. The immediacy of response, compared with traditional routes such as research or focus groups, is one big bonus of such methods.

Putting aside modern trends, it is important not to forget the traditional benefits of cooperation for smaller businesses with intimate relationships with customers. Their proximity to customers means that, with or without the use of new technologies, such businesses can continually gain rich customer insights to help create innovative new offerings. For example, service companies such as marketing agencies or web designers are well-placed to collaborate closely to co-create services which meet the unique needs of individual customers.

Of course, Henry Ford’s flippant quote does help to make an important point; sometimes the company, not the customer, knows best. Communication, cooperation and co-creation are all becoming easier, but this does not mean that the customer should always have the final word. While a company should use available tools to gain customer insights, they must ultimately use good judgement to decide what is best.

 More info – Develop product and services guide