Finance - Top Tips - Innovation

Innovation

This document is designed as a quick reference guide to the subject of Innovation - doing things in new ways.

This will enable you to gain knowledge of a particular skill, task or process in store. This means you can quickly find the key information that you need and refer to it on an ongoing basis whenever you need to refresh your knowledge.

Introduction

Why bother to do things in new and different ways? One simple reason – if we do what we’ve always done…. we’ll get what we have always gotten.

Put another way – unless we innovate – we stagnate. And in business that means ‘Game Over’!

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Logged in as: Adam Bramwell

Finance - Top Tips - Innovation

What you need to know

When faced with any situation or problem, we often tend to favour the solution that we had seen working previously. We do it that way, because we’ve done it that way before! This can be a significant barrier when we’re faced with a new set of circumstances.

Interestingly, children appear to be one group of people that don’t suffer from this barrier. Having had less experience in the world they approach situations in a very different way to adults and are more likely to try out different ways of doing things.

So, as adults how can we learn to think differently – how might you get a ‘child’s eye’ view of what goes on in your store? (Remember, in the context of the word ‘child’ here, we’re really meaning ‘inexperienced’). How about simply picking somebody who is inexperienced, and asking them to look at the problem?

One approach you could take is to ask someone else who is likely to have a different perspective on things to look at the situation for you and make suggestions. For example;

● Someone from another store - they may not do things your way in their store

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● Someone who has a radically different job role? Ask a warehouse colleague from the RSC to examine a customer service issue

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● Someone who doesn’t work for the group - A friend or relative perhaps. Be careful of confidentiality issues though. If the issue is business sensitive, discuss this with your line manager first.

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All of these ideas would likely generate innovative ideas – things you’ve never tried, or even thought about before. Remember – if we do what we’ve always done…. we’ll get what we’ve always gotten.

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Logged in as: Adam Bramwell

Finance - Top Tips - Innovation

What you need to know

Using our Experts

Often when we are faced with a challenge we consult the ‘expert’ – the person who runs that part of the business. If we want to be innovative in our thinking we need to consider the best way to use this person’s expertise as their experience could lead them to an idea that has been tried before.

Experts are a valuable asset to our business and we need to use their knowledge, however to encourage more innovation we could:

● Present the problem in a different way

● Ask them to look at issues in other parts of the business that they have less expertise in, this may provide you with some new ideas and them with a development opportunity

● Set no limits on their thinking e.g. ask them to think about what they would do if there were no restrictions on resources

● Take them out of the store in order to think through the ideas, spending time in a different environment can often help us to see things from a different perspective

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