Business and Innovation: ‘Concentrate on those in front of you – not behind’
Businesses should equip themselves with the characteristics of athletes if they’re going to be successful – that’s according to Tom Cheesewright, futurist, who was speaking at TheBusinessDesk.com’s Business & Innovation event at Nottingham Contemporary yesterday morning (19 April).
The all-morning seminar, attended by around 60 business owners and professionals from across the East Midlands, was told by Cheesewright that they needed to “not to worry about who was behind you, but how fast you need to get ahead”.
He continued: “Sometimes it can take 12 weeks for a piece of information or data to reach a decision-maker in a company, and that isn’t good. So, what I say is that the biggest threat isn’t people behind you on the road to success, it’s the people at the interchange in front of you.
Tom Cheesewright
Speaking about how his company implements innovation, Aaron Dicks of Nottingham-based digital agency Impression, said: “You have to create time to ensure you innovate and try and find out and understand what your staff can do to help that. You want contributions from your workforce on how to grow, but you have to empower them to come forward and do that.”
Guy Berwick, head of innovation and delivery at Freeths, added: “For businesses owners it can be hard to see this. They’re often busy locking themselves away trying to run the business to think about bright ideas and innovation.”
Cheesewright added: “It’s about creating trust. Build teams you can trust and embed innovation early.”
Dr Jeremy Hague of Nottingham Trent University, said: “It’s often very easy to create an innovative business – but you have to truly understand how you did it for it to continue.”
For Cheesewright, the measure of innovation simply comes to down to survival. He said: “The greatest metric is whether a business is still around in ten years’ time. Change is hard in a business, but if staff are engaged it can lead to innovation.”
Guy Berwick
It can be very easy for innovation to be killed, added Berwick. He said: “Whatever vibrancy and free-thinking is innate in younger people can be nullified by over-training or the wrong kind of training. I’ve often seen this in the legal sector.”
Dicks, whose staff are nearly all under 30, said: “We’ve always taken the view that we want to disrupt the industry we operate in. We saw a chance, and we took it – it’s in our DNA to behave that way. It’s more a personality thing for Impression.”
While Hague said that, looking to the future, businesses “have to be prepared for Artificial Intelligence”, Cheesewright argued that the future of innovation would be to embed craft into a product of service. He said: “Automation is inevitable, but the resurgence of craft will be vital. If a business really cares about what it’s doing, it should enable it to be successful.
With thanks to our sponsors Freeths and Nottingham Trent University.
