Aaron Hoos

When I say “innovation”, what do you think of?

Chances are, you think of innovation in your products and services; you may think of blue widgets instead of the normal red ones, or you might think of a way to deliver faster, cheaper service. In the early days of the automobile, other manufacturers provided cars in other colors, innovating beyond Ford’s “any color as long as it was black”. Southwest Airlines provided faster, cheaper service at regional, non-core airports, innovating beyond the other mammoth airlines and their bloated operations.

Books like Blue Ocean Strategy (one of my favorites!) supports this idea of product- or service-specific innovation. However, your products and services aren’t the only place where innovation can happen.

Innovation can happen in your processes, too.

Your processes are the functions and actions required to operate your business but which aren’t necessarily tied to a specific product or service. Examples include:

• Accounting activities
• Order-fulfillment and distribution activities
• Sales funnel activities

A great example of this kind of innovation is Amazon. They didn’t invent or really innovate books (well, until they came out with the Kindle) but they did innovate their sales funnel and order-fulfillment.

Process innovation is better than product or service innovation anyway:

• Process innovation is harder for competitors to quickly discern and copy
• Process innovation doesn’t alienate customers as much as a change in products or services would
• Process innovation can have an immediate, positive impact on financials with some expenditure but without the same related tooling, inventory, or marketing costs

The only drawback (if you want to call it a drawback) is that you don’t end up with whiz-bang products and services because of it and you can’t always promote your innovation to customers. (“Buy from us. We have the most amazingly innovative accounting processes!”)

So you’ll still want to push for product or service innovation to stay ahead of competitors. But you’ll want to continue process innovation to turn your business into a finely-tuned machine.

Here’s what to do:

1. List the steps in your process. For example, your sales funnel might be: lead, prospect, customer, etc. Or, your accounting process might be: gather data, sort, input, submit to the accountant.
2. Identify the specific actions you take at each stage. Write down all of the distinct, discrete actions. For example, you might have an action in your sales funnel where you capture an email address. Or you might have an action in your accounting process where you put your documents into a box to bring over to the accountant’s office.
3. Treat each stage and each action like a specific sub-process that can be modified.
4. Apply some of the well-known innovation-creating tools. Start with a SWOT analysis then try Kim and Mauborgne’s Four Actions Framework.

BMW created a series of 8 short movies starring Clive Owen (plus a number of well-known actors in sporadic roles and directed by big name directors). They were hosted at their own site for a while, then disappeared, and have resurfaced on YouTube. Although they likely cost millions to make, there is little doubt that BMW saw significant ROI on these videos; they helped to elevate BMW to a new level of cool.

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Growing businesses face a variety of challenges, from scaling distribution to hiring and training competent staff.

A knowledge center can help to minimize the pain that comes with growth.

A knowledge center is an offline or online area in your business where you capture and store all of your best practices, procedures, processes, and more. It is a single repository of information to enable effective operations.

It’s a place where your staff can go to find the latest and most relevant information and resources to help them do their job. Instead of running here for one thing and over there for another, you can keep it all together in a single knowledge center.

Your knowledge center might start quite humbly, with just a document or two, but as your business grows, your knowledge center can grow with it.

Hiring a technical writer to help you create and/or improve and/or moderate your knowledge center may seem like an investment in a non-core asset. However, with the right structure and attention, your knowledge center can deliver the following benefits:

• Less time wasted as staff go searching for an answer.
• Faster redeployment time when you change a process and need to change the instructions, guidelines, and policies that accompany that process.
• Lower training costs — knowledge centers support training and sometimes even replace it. Moreover, HR can rely on knowledge centers as a starting point for training that they perform.
• Improved managing: Management moves out of “how-to-do-it” training mindset into a “how-to-do-it-better” mentoring mindset.
• Processes become streamlined for an improved customer experience and potentially lower costs throughout the organization.

Here are some tips to build and maintain a useful knowledge center:

• Don’t start from scratch. You probably already have user manuals and job descriptions you can add
• Keep it simple: Create a blog but make it private (require a sign-in).
• Train your staff to refer to the knowledge center first, before they go up the chain of command.
• Record every question you are asked and add it to the knowledge center.
• Assign on person to be in charge of your knowledge center. Task them with the responsibility maintaining and regularly updating the information.
• Get your staff to record the procedures they perform and add them to the knowledge center.
• As your company grows, start dividing your knowledge centers up and give each department their own knowledge center to maintain.
• Over time, review the content and remove or modify obsolete information.