Innovation – it’s the key to helping small businesses move forward, but most don’t even know how to begin, much less apply their ideas to their companies. Here are a easy few ways you could be innovating now.

1. Add Fresh Thought: The most successful teams continually find fresh thoughts to help add those necessary innovations. It’s that out-of-the-box thinking that creates success. Whether you hire new team members who aren’t necessarily part of the norm in your industry, look to your customers for ideas, or even run a social media campaign to get a few new ideas, you should be consistently adding new thoughts to your company.
2. Eliminate: The world of business actually tends to thrive when things get lean. Wondering why? It helps you focus on the core of your product or service, so ask yourself what you could take out of the equation to make things stronger, then move in that direction. For example, long before Amazon started selling books, people went to physical stores to shop for them. Amazon took the store out of the “book store,” and it changed the print industry forever. What can you shake up through elimination?
3. Revisit History: Just because the world is a different place today than it was forty years ago doesn’t mean that history has nothing to offer your company. Take a look at what your company might have been decades ago. Revisit ideas that worked then that you might be able to adapt to today’s culture, and you may have a big win on your hands.

Ideas like these give you a solid starting place, but you need a way to handle these ideas before you start generating those. Create a team that vets these ideas for viability, then implements them prior to your innovation generation tactics. Adding the infrastructure before the ideas means you’ll be able to bring them to your customers far faster than you’d ever imagined.