To Innovate or Not to Innovate

To Innovate or Not to Innovate?
Anyonita Green


Let’s be honest. Innovation rarely gets seen as something anyone could be involved with. It carries a stigma that implies it is best reserved for highly educated individuals in lab coats and has no space outside the scientific confines of a laboratory. Maintaining our honesty, most companies don’t incentivize innovation, a daunting flaw since you cannot have success without failure and since the very nature of innovation begets failure.

Inside the Fab Lab, Manchester.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results. On that same token, if growth is achieved by doing things differently, you could harbour the opinion that growth illustrates sanity whilst yielding innovation.

Before we go further, I am aware that innovation has become one of those snazzy buzzwords—everybody’s happy to throw it around in their business conversation, saturating every aspect of their work life with this word, but how many of us have actually stopped to consider innovation? Do we know what it is truly capable of? Are we culpable of boxing innovation into a place of “super fancy word with no meaning” instead of allowing it to become an action?

If we are honest, innovation currently compares disproportionately with high growth. The reason being is that many small businesses view innovation as a one-off as opposed to being something continuous and necessary for growth. In actuality, the key to a small businesses’ sustainability is the ability to be malleable and change with the market. An innovative small business is one that continues to offer new things even though it is tempting to just make one thing and flog it until its death.

Because of the vast differences between the wholesale market and customer expectancy, anyone in a small business who chooses to stand still and not to innovate, although they may experience some limited growth, will find that their market share will eventually decrease. For this reason alone, it is vital that small businesses embrace innovation and get in the habit of utilising it to the best of their abilities.

Nestled in Manchester’s city centre, in the up and coming area of Ancoats, housed in an oddly designed, striking building sits the Fabrication Laboratory, colloquially referred to as the Fab Lab. The concept of the Fab Lab began as an outreach programme led by MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld, with the aim to provide easy access to tools for digital fabrication. Manchester is home to the only Fab Lab in the country; a notable accolade since there are over 90 digital fabrication labs looping the globe.

What better place for a hub of innovation to be situated than in Manchester with its rich history of inventions and big thinkers? One of the beautiful things about the Fab Lab is its purpose—designed for the public, it is a place where virtually anything is possible.

One of the first things manufactured at the Fab Lab.

When you enter the sprawling establishment, you are instantly face to face with a display of successful inventions and quirky products that were created there. The walls are covered with inspirational messages, encouraging you to think and to create, reminding you that you have stepped into a Willy Wonka-ish type world, “A place where you can create almost anything.”

We mentioned the difficulty small businesses often face when it comes to incorporating innovation into their work agenda. The Fab Lab is just the type of place that can help to address this difficulty and to overcome it by offering training or support in a broad sense and by helping business leaders make important decisions such as:  Who in your company is going to lead innovation and innovative thinking?

Haydn Insley, manager at the Fab Lab, has given these four tips for innovation in business:

1.       Keep your eyes and options open—don’t discount what you haven’t done before.

2.       You, as the business leader or owner, do not have to come up with all of the ideas yourself.

3.       Encourage creativity while being able to accept failure. Innovation, as we mentioned, begets failure. The simple act of looking at what you offer and thinking of enterprising ways to enhance that and improve on it almost guarantees that there will be some failure. Don’t be afraid of failure; learn from those mistakes!

4.       Innovation isn’t just top-down; true innovation lets all ideas bloom. Anyone can have an idea for increasing revenue, bolstering sales or doing something a bit better than current practice. Someone serious about innovation will encourage these ideas and accept them when they come from even unlikely sources.

To recap, innovation is necessary, messy and doesn’t happen often enough. To continue to move forward in business, especially those of a very niche enterprise, we must be willing to embrace innovation and not to embrace it flippantly as an empty word without much meaning. We must be willing to get on our hands and knees and get in the very grit of innovation. Remember, anyone can innovate!

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Upcoming events at the Fab Lab that might interest you are:

·         a Manchester Science Festival event in conjunction with the BBC where young people will be instructed on building robots;

·          training courses for interactive electronic devices will be throughout September

·         and the Fab Lab will be offering 25 percent off all projects completed before September.

If you are interested in learning more about the Fab Lab or would like to schedule some time where you and your employees can be taught about innovation techniques, then be sure to visit www.fablabmanchester.org for more information.