Despite all of the “buzz” around innovation, it still remains an elusive quality that only a few companies (like Apple, Facebook and Google) have. For everybody else, the advice is some version of “do whatever Facebook or Google does”. While this might be helpful for some business owners, this advice isn’t a reliable path toward success. Your business can’t innovate like Facebook. It has to innovate like your business.
That’s where Bigger Business Blueprint: Modern Marketing, Innovation & Scalable Growth comes in. The book seeks to fill in the gap between innovation as a concept and as a practice.
What is Bigger Business Blueprint About?
Bigger Business Blueprint: Modern Marketing, Innovation & Scalable Growth was written for the express purpose of outlining a path toward strategic innovation. Innovation, as the book discusses, comes in two basic flavors, strategic or accidental. You either plan for it or you get lucky.
The issue is that most business owners chase strategic innovation while pursuing the opposite (innovation-by-luck). Both strategic innovation and innovation-by-luck look the same from an outsider’s perspective. From an insider’s perspective, it’s two totally different mindsets. As the author of Bigger Business Blueprint shares, business owners with a strategic innovation mindset are able to leverage their resources for maximum output. They don’t waste time trying to find innovation like a needle in the proverbial haystack. Instead, they build a strong business first and integrate innovation into the process.
The book digs even further into the traits of a strategically innovative business. In particular, he identifies the following characteristics:
- Automated: Comfortable with adapting technology for their purpose
- Measurement-oriented: Focused on tracking and learning from data
- Honest: Realistic and transparent about their current position
- Collaborative: Shares information instead of locking it away in silos
- Succession-focused: Has a plan for the continued operation of business
These traits separate businesses that chase the next trend from those that anticipate and leverage the future. To get to that point, business owners need to take a comprehensive and broad look at their business framework, something the book outlines in various sections. As readers go through these sections, they can start connecting the dots between their large-scale thinking plans and their day-to-day strategies.
Author Jason Palliser began in the loan and real estate industry. Palliser leveraged the skills gained from those industries to become a speaker, trainer, consultant and entrepreneur who loves sports and the occasional good prank.
What Was Best About Bigger Business Blueprint?
The best part of Bigger Business Blueprint is the book’s focus on going deeper into innovation as a process. Many books on innovation focus on it as some magical principle that can be translated from an innovative company (like Google) to another company. The author recognizes that innovation doesn’t work like that in reality. Palliser invites readers to look at their current processes and succession plans before they start innovation plans. This is a key step missing in innovation books for business owners and entrepreneurs.
What Could Have Been Done Differently?
Bigger Business Blueprint helps readers understand the gap between their current business setup and their future innovation potential. It doesn’t, however, avoid the “checklist syndrome” the author warned against in the beginning of the book. The “checklist syndrome” occurs when an author overwhelms the reader with too many options to get started. The author attempts to rectify the problem with a detailed outline in the book, but more information needs to be provided on turning this outline into a sustainable process for innovation.
Why Read Bigger Business Blueprint?
Bigger Business Blueprint urges readers to think about innovation from the ground-level. If you, as a business leader or manager, are tired of reading about the magical innovation of Google without a road map, this book provides it along with the major road stops along the way. Many of these road stops may be familiar, but Palliser shows how these road stops connect to the broader goal of innovation. The author then goes on to show how business succession can be incorporated into innovation as well, a topic often missing from other innovation books.
This article, “Bigger Business Blueprint Bridges Gap Between Conceptual Innovation and Practice” was first published on Small Business Trends