Innovate to Help Your Business Bounce Back

Many entrepreneurs have seized the opportunity to try something new in their business in 2020. Faced with an uncertain future, it takes creativity, and courage, to launch a new product or service during a pandemic. Here are three things to consider if you’re looking to innovate for additional income.A new idea for today, or tomorrow?All business owners need to think about recent changes in consumer behaviour, and which habits are likely to stick around long-term. Does your plan address an opportunity created by the pandemic response, or does it solve a long-term need in the marketplace? Will your offering help people live during quarantine, or will it remain relevant once the population feels safe to circulate again? Will it bring you additional income now, and in the future? The longevity you foresee for this new way of doing business will determine the effort and resources you put behind it.Work with what you haveYour idea doesn’t necessarily demand a whole new product, or team. Think about how you can deliver an existing product or service in a new way. Can you bundle your offering with complementary brands or businesses to create additional income? If you need a new skill set on your team, can you retrain existing staff members? Or, better yet, rehire employees who were let go due to COVID-19?Move fastSpeed up decision-making and increase delegation to eliminate red tape that often traps new initiatives in inertia. “Fail fast” is a mantra in the startup world, but you don’t have to be a tech entrepreneur to understand the importance of speed-to-market with a new idea. Whether your innovation becomes a reliable extra income source or not, the sooner you know, the sooner you can course correct.