Setting Aside Creative Time for Your Business: The Importance of Innovation

Innovation and creativeness often come hand-in-hand. Most of the time, you can’t have one without the other. In order to be creative, you need to be thinking innovatively and vice-a-versa. But why is being both creative and innovative so important for businesses today? You might be thinking that it’s not relevant in your industry. 

You may think that your business doesn’t actually need innovation or creativity. But you’d be mistaken. Every company needs those two qualities in order to thrive. So let’s delve deeper into the importance of both creativity and innovation in business, together with how to carve out the time to be creative, even when things get busy.

The importance of innovation in business

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the definition of innovation is; “a new idea or method that is being tried for the first time, or the use of such ideas or methods”. That’s exactly what businesses need to thrive and be successful. You might be wondering how and why innovation is so important for companies, no matter the industry you might be. It helps businesses to foster growth, stay ahead of the game and adapt to ever-changing environments and settings; something that’s never been so important in this fluid, fast-paced world we live in. But why is innovation so important? Let’s take a closer look:

It drives growth

By creating new products, offering new services or putting innovative ideas out there, you’re driving growth and success for your business. Excellent, innovative business models that stand out from the crowd are what adds value to your customers, therefore helping to differentiate your business from your competitors’ companies. 

It solves problems

Innovation forces people to address challenges in society and it makes them look closer at solutions and opportunities that can help to solve the issues that people are experiencing. From the challenges you’re facing as a business to the challenges your customers and clients might be faced with, innovation solves the problems that you might have thought were impossible to resolve.

It boosts learning

Innovation will make you delve deeper into your mind, drawing on ideas and possibilities that you may never have thought of before. This is what can help your business to be modern, ever-changing and successful. Innovation encourages learning on a scale that you may never have experienced before.

Unlike learning at school, innovation is completely unstructured but it’s all-inspiring. It makes you think outside of the box to come up with solutions and ideas that have never been thought of before. From your marketing department through to those doing the deliveries, everyone has the power to be innovative.

It allows for adaptability 

Disruption can occur in business at any time – just take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of that. Therefore, it’s important that you’re able to adapt quickly to change and innovation helps you to do just that. From moving operations online to producing other products that are relevant to the times, innovation unveils effective change that allows for businesses to be successful.

It enables improvement 

Stagnation is detrimental to businesses, no matter the industry you work in. In order to achieve goals, constant improvement and earning is needed and innovation helps you to do that. Innovation also expands your market reach, increases revenue streams and reduces outgoing costs somewhat.

It helps you to stay ahead of the competition 

There are more competing businesses out in the world now than there ever has been before. Innovation enables you to anticipate and respond to customer needs as and when needed, therefore helping you to stay ahead of the game.

Why should you set time aside to be creative?

Just as it’s important to embrace innovation in business, it’s also imperative that you embrace creativity along with it. While innovation is more of a science and a process, creativity is fluid. There are no restraints and everything is possible when it comes to being creative. No matter how outrageous your ideas or creations are, it helps to inject a personality into your brand. While creativity and innovation often come side-by-side, creativity in business offers different benefits, including:

• Giving you the ability to communicate effectively
• Learning how to master the art of storytelling
• Encouraging employee engagement and collaboration
• Ensuring a customer-centric approach to your operations
• Making the best decisions when it comes to risk management and decision-making
• Allowing you the space to work smarter and not harder
• Identifying opportunities that you might not have thought about before

How to set time aside to be creative

Now that you know how important it is to start embracing creativity and innovation in business, I’m sure you’re wondering how you can do it effectively. Running a business, understandably, is a time-consuming task, no matter what industry you’re in. Here’s how to carve out some time to be creative if you’re struggling to fit it into your daily routine:

Batch produce social media posts & schedule them accordingly

While batch-producing social media posts doesn’t seem like the creative thing to do, the creativity part comes in creating the posts in the first place. Just because you’re batch-producing doesn’t mean to say that you’re not injecting creativity into it. Take the time to make your social media posts and then schedule them up to go live as and when needed. From infographics to micro-copy accompanied by photos or posters, social media posts can still be creative when batch-produced and scheduled, it just helps to free up some time later in the month for you to set aside to be creative.

Set out a list of priorities

In marketing especially, not every task is fun and creative. Like with every industry, there are necessary tasks that can be pressing, but that doesn’t require creativity in order to get the job done. Set out your priority list in order of what needs to be done, rather than what you want to do. Once those things are out of the way, you can then focus your remaining time on being creative. 

Put your ‘do not disturb’ on

The best way to make sure that you’re setting time aside to be creative is to ensure you have no distractions. Being creative requires time that is undisturbed and uninterrupted, otherwise it can throw off your thought process and it puts you outside of the creative zone that took a while to get into in the first place. If you’re wanting to set time aside to be creative, put on your ‘do not disturb’ so people know that you’re in the zone. 

Be disciplined and make rules

Being disciplined when it comes to being creative and innovative in the workplace is a sure way of making full use of the time you’ve made to actually get creative in the first place. Take the time to focus on what your goals are from a creative and innovative standpoint and then go from there.

Kumo is a dedicated digital marketing agency with over two decades of experience behind us. We are pleased to offer a wealth of marketing services, including SEO, PPC, content writing, website design and so much more. If you would like to learn how we can propel your business into the spotlight, then get in touch with a member of our friendly, professional team today – we’re always happy to hear from you.