At the Business Champion Awards, we want to know what you’ve been doing. The United Kingdom is responsible for so many leaps and bounds in innovation and many of it goes unrecognised by the brilliant minds who are simply so focused on adapting and creating that they forget to shout about their work until they hire a marketing team.

Not anymore. 22nd March 2023 is when it is being celebrated.

Innovation within a business can be the sole reason a business started, and it may be the sole driving force to keep it going and growing. Frustration with the status quo can lead many people within a specific industry to break free on their own to disrupt how procedures are done or innovate with tech.

Why does innovation cause businesses so much stress?

For a business to be constantly innovating it doesn’t just need to be ahead of the curve, it needs to set the curve. Never cheap, innovation requires the CEO to lead and inspire the entire team to be constantly analysing their work and data perceptions coupled with market trends, potential new verticals and competitors as well as innovation from their current and potential new suppliers. Phew! As if running a business wasn’t work enough.

It’s no mean feat to keep a team motivated in this type of environment. This is particularly hard with innovation reliant companies because the moment a product is launched, the focus needs to shift onto driving the next iteration of the product or service.

Managers need to bear in mind that rewards need to be made and team positivity needs to be managed to keep them pushing forwards.

Growing a business and finding commercial success demands innovation into new verticals, as well as aligning your company culture, growth of your team and your ability to lead and inspire.

Total innovation leads to true innovation

Within the Business Champion Awards, we will be taking a holistic view on this and looking at the product or service that has been heralded for recognition of innovation as well as how the business and team have come together to make it happen. Take Porsche for an example – instead of just trying to innovate into EV powered technology within their cars amongst their everyday practices, they instead created a mission statement that it was going to be their future and built a new factory from scratch to ensure that every single aspect of the new path moving forwards pertained to their mission statement and level of innovation. They future proofed their innovation and the Porsche Taycan zoomed into existence.

Nick Sillicorn, the chief editor of Idea to Value and also the CEO & Founder of Improvides Innovation Consulting, expanded on this reasoning by saying: ‘A common mistake that companies make when they talk about innovation being a company value without actually putting the required level of support behind it to make it happen.

Coming up with ideas is relatively easy, fast and cheap, but then those ideas need to be executed. This is where companies often fail, by not providing the required level of time and budget to take a rough idea, refine it, experiment on it and finally turn it into a real solution.

Additionally, companies usually think of it just from an internal viewpoint, such as whether they think the offering is being improved when it is updated. In reality, if the customer doesn’t perceive the changes as having value, then they won’t be compelled to purchase it.

So, it is all about the customer’s perceived value.’

What are the Business Champion Awards’ judges going to be looking for?

Our judges will be diving deeply into your five-year plan, to see how your new innovation came to fruition. Yours will be a story that will make the judges nod their heads as they listen to the reasoning behind your decision-making process.

Follow our champion check list and get applying …

• Share the reasons behind the will to innovate

Good luck with your entry.