It’s not easy to determine how you should innovate and develop your brand to outcompete all others in your industry. That’s because no one is going to present this information to you or spot gaps, because if they knew it themselves, they would pursue that path.
For this reason, it’s important to be mindful about innovation, not just performing it for its own sake. It has to be tied to a wider vision that applies to your real business plans, and make sense for your particular company.
This is all well and good, but you can’t innovate unless you spot a space to move into. This could be part of a market that has gone underserved, for example, or maybe a priority or trend that hasn’t been captured by the rest of your industry.
In this post, we’ll discuss some varied efforts you could take to ensure your own best approach, and spot opportunities before anyone else does:
Table of contents
Review Markets to Spot Gaps
Keeping a casual eye on your space is one path to maintaining your position, but if you’re trying to innovate in any useful direction, it’s probably worth spending more time getting under the surface. Not everything that matters is sitting in plain sight, after all. There’s usually at least one progressing change somewhere, but it might not shout out loud to begin with.
So instead of glancing at what everyone’s shouting about on social media or posting in press releases, consider looking at pricing trends, spot gaps in availability, or products that quietly disappear from shelves, especially given the political situation in some countries and the changing shape of markets. Tariffs and the suspension of them, for example, might give rise to a new opportunity you can focus on.
Judge Market Sentiment
Not everything comes down to hard data, as much as we’d like it to. There’s often a quieter trend running underneath sales figures, and you get better at noticing it the longer you’ve been paying attention to the market and its sentiments changing.
Often, customers aren’t sure what they want, but you can still tell something’s off. That might show up in the way they ask questions, how long they take to commit, or how skeptical they seem about options they would’ve grabbed straight away last year. Unfortunately, we’ve seen markets make good on changing tastes, such as smoking companies moving into vape markets. Perhaps your opportunity focus can have better, healthier results.
Accessibility Pursuits
Plenty of companies go all-in on tech and never once stop to think if people can actually use what they’re offering, and that’s usually where they miss something obvious.
There’s always a way to make things clearer, smoother, or more approachable. That might be language or how you onboard people, or the layout of your service or the way you deliver support. While everyone says they care about accessibility, not many follow through in a way that feels genuine.
What makes this useful for innovation is how often it lets you connect with customer bases, because people who were interested but couldn’t quite see how it would work for them are no inclined to. Open that door, and they might just walk in on their own.
Retaining Customers
A strange number of business owners chase new traffic like it’s the only path forward, when in reality, they might already be sitting on something more valuable, despite what the business guides tell you. Customers that stick with you for years are likely to continue doing so. Make sure you’re looking after them, then.
Maybe they get a faster reply than they expected, maybe they notice that you’ve remembered something they mentioned before, or maybe they click through a process that used to drag and now just works without asking too much, and they might not call it out, but they feel it, and that feeling tends to keep them from looking around. In other words, maybe the opportunity you have right now is optimizing what you already have.
Following Through With R&D
Researched ideas don’t really breathe until you give them room to mess up a bit, get tested in weird places, and then manage the results and direction based on what you find.
The process isn’t supposed to be clean, and it’s important to keep that in mind, but you must keep moving, and if you treat development like a loop that never fully closes, you’re less likely to stall out while waiting for perfect conditions that never come. Also, research isn’t necessarily about having brand new tech developed (of course), but maybe just reviewing your processes for efficiency.
Using AI Without Losing Yourself
There’s no shortage of hype around AI right now and the loudest voices always make it sound like you’re either fully onboard or you’re falling behind, but in reality, it’s best to be cautious, and use it to help the parts of your work that feel repetitive or slow or frustrating.
For example, you may find value in implementing a script that sorts messages before they hit your inbox or a tool that summarizes research so you’re not spending hours reading things you don’t need , thus innovating a process no other competitor uses. Remember AI can be just as internal as it is external, and sometimes if you develop a focused process other businesses aren’t using, you’ve given yourself a real leg up.
Environmental Efforts
People don’t need to see a full manifesto anymore to assume you’ve thought about your footprint, as conscious consumers are already looking for the signs, and if they don’t find them, that absence tends to speak louder than any promise on your homepage.
So if you’re making changes in that way, such as moving toward commercial solar so you’re pulling less from the grid or switching out materials that create unnecessary waste, those decisions can be marketed, and if other companies in your industry aren’t communicating the same level of care, then you have an opportunity to work on here for the better.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily spot gaps in your industry going forward and use your innovative mindset to showcase a new, burgeoning set of possibilities to get excited about. You may be surprised by the impact you have.
