Innovation | Teik Oh

How To Keep Innovating

Dec 20 2016

“We need to innovate to thrive.”

“Business has to be agile these days.”

“The cheese has moved.”

“Every market sector will face disruption.”

We’ve all heard these phrases haven’t we? “Innovate” and “agile” and “disruption”, what do these trendy words mean?

Well, believe it or not, there’s nothing new under the sun. All these trendy sayings mean something that businesses have had to do for centuries – we all need to move with the times. If you settle, you go the way of Kodak and Blackberry, and in the sense of industries, you face the challenges of the taxi industry in the face of Uber or of the hotel industry when Air BnB is out there.

So you have to innovate. You have to be aware of what is happening around you, to your business, to your customers, to your industry, to your market, and find new ways of doing things or new ways to serve. Yet business success is a game of inches, not Eureka moments.

If you expect miracles, you set up your mindset for the BIG new thing to invent. This makes people feel nervous because they will find it hard to innovate at such a big leap. So they react by working on what they know, and innovation? Nothing.

You need to shift mindsets – yours and those of your team. Believe that innovation is possible but you do it through small improvements. If people are allowed to change their world with small improvements, then they are not afraid to fail because if they do fail, it’s small. When a good attempt has not succeeded, don’t label it a failure – accept that an experiment has given you a result and ask “what did we learn to do/not to do?”

And remember to measure. Take simple measurements like time saved, or cost saved – feel the progress and celebrate, then look for more.

Finally if you are reading this on one of my social media channels, you might be missing a lot of great ideas and tools and resources to help you grow your business, create effective strategy and show leadership. Why don’t you go to my website at teikoh.com and sign up to get these free ideas sent directly to your inbox (not forgetting to mark the email from teikoh.com as safe so that it doesn’t go straight to your spam folder.

See you next week!

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Plan With An Eye To The Outside

Nov 29 2016

When you wrote your last business plan, did you go on a “retreat”?

That’s what most people do – they clear out some time and take their team out of the workplace so they won’t be disturbed, and they spend a couple of days discussing what’s going on in the business and how to improve it and set goals and strategies.

But here’s what’s wrong with this approach – more often than not you discuss and find solutions for problems and opportunities from inside your business, and forget that it’s external stimuli that will have serious and unpredictable effects.

So you go along and implement your plan only to have, one day —– WHAM! A big problem from outside hits you where you weren’t expecting.

Watch this week as I discuss how to plan with an eye to external factors.

Let’s summarise – use PESTLE to analyse and think about the external factors that could have an impact on your plans:

P for Political, being any political changes in your region that could have an impact;

E for Economic, requiring you to look at the local, national and global economy;

S for Social, asking what social trends are happening right now that could affect your business;

T for Technological – what is happening in and outside your industry that is affected by tech changes, social media and so on;

L for Legal, looking for potential changes to the law that could impact your industry;

E for Environmental, including the environment as well as surrounding factors – can any development here affect you?

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Comment 13

The Product Development Process

Oct 18 2016

So, you have a new idea for a new product or a new service, and you’re really excited about it. Well done you!

The question is how do you go from new idea to development and launch?

If you’ve been following me, you’ll know that I’m all about systematising processes. My career has come to today, where I have used all my experience and training – over 35 plus years of working with entrepreneurs and small businesses – to use existing proven methodologies and create simple to use systems for my clients. There’s no need for you to read loads of books and “try” theories – I’ve done it for you.

Which means I have a system for developing and launching a new product or service! It’s one of 55 really useful management tools that I have collated into my book called “The Management Toolbox” available from Amazon.

The Product Development Process is a 6 step process that begins generating the idea and ends (if the steps have been successfully hurdled) with the product launch.

In the video below I’ll take you through the Product development Process.

Let’s summarise those steps:-

Generate the idea;
Test the concept;
Design it;
Product test;
Market test; and
Product launch.

And remember, this is important – the steps are hurdles, each a test of the validity of the original idea.

Go to my website to get more free systems and resources available for download at teikoh.com.

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Comment 13

What Makes a Business Resilient?

Oct 04 2016

As an entrepreneur and small business owner, I know that you want to build a long term business to give you a great life with your loved ones, and to provide financial freedom and independence. In order to do so, the business you are creating needs to be resilient – resilient to bad fortune, bad times, strong competition, unpredicted hardship, and everything else, right?

So what makes a business resilient and how do you create such an ecosystem in your business?

Let’s get straight into it – in this video I give you the three characteristics of resilient businesses that I have distilled from over 35 years of working with small businesses and resilient entrepreneurs all over the world.

I truly mean it when I say that in my experience, all over the world and under any adverse conditions, the entrepreneurs and small businesses I have seen ride the bad times and not just survive but improve, are those who have those three characteristics. This means to me that they are common characteristics you need to have, wherever you are, facing whatever situation, in whatever business, selling whatever product or service!

If they’re common characteristics then learn from others and use their formula.

If you want to know more about how to grow your business into that long lasting dream, go to my website and see all the free tools, ideas, systems and downloads there.

You might also want to get my free download “Entrepreneur’s Business Health Checklist”, just click here.

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Comment 13

Creating a Resilient Climate in your Business

Dec 29 2015

Two weeks ago, in the first part of this two-part series of articles on creating a resilient business, I wrote about the characteristics of a resilient organisation.

I identified that your business needs to display the three characteristics of:-

Facing down reality;
Having a strong purpose;
Empowering innovation;

and identified a fourth characteristic, which was good leadership.

In this week’s article, Part 2, I want to deal with how to create a resilient climate in your business. Read More

Comment 13

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Category - Innovation

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How To Keep Innovating

Plan With An Eye To The Outside

The Product Development Process

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What Makes a Business Resilient?

Creating a Resilient Climate in your Business