Growing and innovating as an entrepreneur: why is it important? 

As an entrepreneur, when you choose to grow, you must innovate. This is because innovations create GREAT opportunities and are crucial to the survival, growth and success of your business. Innovating contributes to finding real solutions and meeting challenges. Growth and innovation are inseparable as far as I am concerned. No growth without innovation. In this blog, I explain this further and you will discover how to innovate with your business. 

What does innovation mean?

If you search the Internet for the term innovation significance, you quickly come across the following description: renewing your services, products or business processes. I myself call innovation "strategic renewal. It is changing, adapting and improving your offer, your revenue model or your business model and your (description of) the ideal customer.

Innovate meaning = strategically innovating, continuing to develop to grow as an entrepreneur and as a company.

What is innovation and entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship requires guts, courage and leadership. You do not wait, but rather take steps to try new things, without any certainty of whether it will succeed. To grow and develop as an entrepreneur, you have to take risks, experiment, learn from this, analyze and optimize this, so you can take another step. And if it doesn't go the way you want or it fails, you don't give up, you keep going. That's innovation and entrepreneurship.

The reasons to grow and innovate

As a company, why is it important to innovate? By innovating as a business, you create great opportunities, and these opportunities are crucial to the success and growth of your business. Because if you do what you always did, then you know what you will get: the same outcome as always. Innovation brings you more. So to grow, change is crucial.  

• Innovating helps you grow, because you get to DO what you are darn good at, energized and makes an impact
• Innovating helps you develop creative concepts and differentiate yourself in the marketplace 
• Market values innovations
• Innovate helps you optimize your business processes so you work smarter and smarter

By innovating, you become onMARKily Profitable with a distinctive positioning and profitable strategy. You get profit in money, time, energy and impact

What makes a company innovative?

Where many entrepreneurs and companies go wrong is thinking that the individual elements they have now are very valuable. This is not true: it is not a whole. Loose elements that don't fit together are like puzzle pieces of different puzzles mixed together. You're not going to complete the puzzle with that. If you as a business and entrepreneur take steps to grow, evolve in the market, keep an eye on your target market and top customers and adjust accordingly, you will always offer the best offer and result. That is what makes you incomparable.  

So don't wait. Take action, keep an eye on the developments in the market and continuously investigate whether your offer is in line with the demand of your top customers. By growing and innovating, you become resilient and distinguish yourself in today's competitive market. You do this by doing something different. You put new services or products in the market, you adjust your business processes so that you get a new and value-enhancing result. A result in which the pieces of the puzzle fit together better and better. Your value increases and so do your value-driven prices. 

How can you encourage innovation?

Innovating to grow is not an end in itself. It is a means to achieve your ambitious goals in life and in your business. If you want grow as a business do you have a clear mission statement and a distinctive strategic plan. A strategic plan in which your goals and your action points are very clearly formulated, so you know exactly what actions you need to take at the right time to achieve your goals. Don't have this as a company? Then you are not innovating, because you are stuck where you are now, so to speak.

Growing as a business also means making mistakes. They also call it failure, but because failure has a negative connotation, I prefer to call it experimentation. You see, there is a power in learning from your mistakes. You learn by doing things OTHERS, improving and innovating. That's a process you should always keep working on. Especially if you want to keep developing as an ambitious entrepreneur and take new growth steps in your business.

Do you have a great drive to want to develop and innovate? That's good, because these are the key pillars to grow and innovate as a person and for the healthy growth of your business. Experiment by marketing the change as a pilot. When you approach this in a thoughtful way, challenge yourself in the process and have the courage to experiment, analyze, reflect and learn from it, you not only develop personally, but your business grows.

Innovation comes with 'growing pains'

By the responding to innovations every time you take the next step with your business. And sometimes that can be a bit of a "pain. You have to get out of your comfort zone and show guts.

I also compare it to cycling in the mountains. You have to work hard to get up a mountain, you shift gears to accelerate again and sometimes experience the "pain" of your efforts. Once you reach the top of the mountain, you enjoy the beautiful views and vistas - your new possibilities, opportunities and growth that you did not yet see in the valley. Then to GAAN like crazy, to enjoy the well-deserved descent. A new challenge lies ahead again. That gives you a kick!