Creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, forward thinking, fresh thinking, new ideas, innovation, and reinventing your business are all important and mandatory for being able to grow business in today’s global business world.

It is fairly obvious to most that new products and services are evolving at a fast pace. Those business organizations with new products and new services seem to be growing and those without are declining.

New and creative ideas need to be applied in these areas:

• New products and new services

• Quality improvement

• Cost savings

• New markets

• New applications

• Customer needs

You must aggressively and deliberately seek out creative ideas from numerous sources….

All efforts need to be integrated into all levels of a business organization and all functions:

• Production

• Engineering

• Customer service

• Sales

• Marketing

• Marketing communications

• Public relations (PR)

• Training, internal and external

• Research and development

• Logistics

• Capabilities improvements and advancements

• All functions and parts of the operations

Without such integration, efforts will fail.

To accomplish this integration, all employees and staff need to be formally and continually trained to assure follow-up and that everyone’s minds and efforts are kept fresh. Formal processes and programs need to be established to apply the new concepts and efforts made to continually apply them to stimulate positive results.

Formal incentive and reward programs need to be established. There are challenges:

• Businesses may not have the money to offer adequate internal and external training to all employees and staff (when this is an issue, be creative).

• Businesses may not have the healthy mindset to do this.

• Businesses may only want to train management on those things which will hinder progress, since all employees need this to contribute.

• Employees may not want to support this because of a lack of trust with the business from previous employee layoffs, downsizing, removal of personal benefits and poor feelings from other matters.

• Employees may not want to support this unless there is a significant incentive program in place to financially reward them personally if they contribute to growing and improving the business.

When acting on new ideas and new thinking, it is important to focus on how you can do it or accomplish it and not why you cannot do it.

• Management may not want to support these efforts because they do not trust employees, do not value all employees, do not want to share any level of power and responsibilities; and do not want to appropriately recognize and reward for all employee’s ideas contributing to growing and improving the business.

• The false belief that the company has reached this expertise and skill level already.

• The false belief that they know more than most others and others cannot give them creative ideas and new thinking to help grow the business and solve problems and issues.

• The false belief that smaller improvements and advancements are not important and only large ones mean anything.

All of these challenges can be overcome with a true team effort, honesty and mutual respect from all. However, a major mind change and a reinventing of the business organization approach from all is needed. Staff, employees and management who do not support such efforts may need replacing. Creative ideas come from individuals, from groups, from business organizations and from a variety of external sources. You must aggressively and deliberately seek out creative ideas from numerous sources then quickly act on them.

Small ideas, improvements and advancements can add up to major things and can lead to major ideas and major advancements. Small ideas, improvements and advancements need to be sought out and valued.

These smaller things may position a business for something good and significant in the immediate future. They may also solve issues early to prevent costly issues and major problems later.

When acting on new ideas and new thinking, it is important to focus on how you can do it or accomplish it and not why you cannot do it. You must be highly creative and adopt ‘outside-the-box-thinking’ to be effective in seeking out creative, fresh new ideas and innovative thinking from all potential sources.

No one person or group has all the answers and all of the new ideas. You will find that creative new ideas and new thinking will come from all types of new and unusual sources. You must seek these out and continually do so. Any effort less than these is not effective.

Here is a simple and creative idea on where you can get innovative ideas and thinking about your business; how to grow and improve the business and possibly how to solve problems and challenges.

Make arrangements with your school and community college to visit as a guest speaker. Speak with them about your business, problems, issues and your challenges. Encourage the students to ask questions. Then, most important, ask them to give you suggestions and new ideas about how to solve your problems and issues and how to improve your business, increase sales and expand business.

Get ready to write down lots of notes and new ideas. You will be quite surprised on the creative ideas and new thinking that they will provide you.

Those business organizations that have been successful with new products and new services utilizing creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, forward thinking, fresh thinking, new ideas, and innovation have faced the challenges and welcome the new mindset that is needed to conquer the challenges. The positive financial payoffs are great for the business organizations that are successful with this. The negative results from failure of accomplishing this are great as well. There is no in-between, partial progress or median with this. You successfully accomplish this and grow or you do not and eventually go out of business to be replaced by competition.

Business organizations need the assistance of professional advisors and universities to help accomplish this. They have some of the expertise, knowledge and resources that can help. As Albert Einstein noted, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”