Innovation seems like a big business activity, but small businesses also need to be innovative if they want to see long-term growth. However, innovation can’t just happen on the fly, you need to actually create a business innovation budget if you want a lasting impact.
But small business owners are often careful about where they spend their money, and not everyone sees the value of allocating valuable budget dollars to innovation. So, let’s talk about why innovation should definitely be on your list.
Why Do We Care About Innovation?
The bottom line is that businesses that put a focus on innovation are more likely to grow, scale and increase both their employee numbers and their profit. Innovation is something that helps business growth and if you want to build a healthy, sustainable business, you need to innovate.
Innovation can help your business with a host of important things, including:
- Better understanding your market
- Expand your offerings, expertise and capabilities
- Solve more problems and expand your audience
But innovation rarely happens by accident. If innovation is on your list of things to do, you’ll need to build a business innovation budget to support it. Otherwise, you’ll be out of luck attempting to siphon money from other places.
Not only that, but budgeting for your innovation from the leftovers of other budgets (if you have anything left) can stifle the actually creativity in your innovation process and essentially ruin your innovation.
You Need a Business Innovation Budget
Businesses that don’t budget for innovation don’t innovate. Money doesn’t grow on trees, as they say, and when there isn’t a line-item in the budget for something it will eventually be forgotten for more important things.
That’s where creating a business innovation budget comes in. If you want to innovate, you need a budget. Even if you don’t have a huge budget overall, you can still make a real impact on innovation but you can’t if you don’t consider it into your business practices.
If you can’t allocate a big chunk of money towards your business innovation budget but you still want to make it a line item this year, then there are a few things that you might be able to do.
Try planning for small innovation projects instead of big ones. Small projects typically mean smaller budgets, which can help ensure you’re still innovating but you’re not spending massive amounts of cash.
At the end of the day, making sure that you actually pay attention to innovation and purposely work at it can help immensely for your business long-term health.
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Tae started out as a journalist before following the money into the corporate world. But it turns out that the grass isn’t always greener and now you can find her spending most of her time writing about all the things she loves. Namely, money, travel and business with a hefty dose of self-deprecating humor. She is a podcast fanatic, blogging aficionado and loves to find new ways to turn passions into cold hard cash!
