One only has to scan the headlines or talk to friends to realise many small business leaders are doing it tough. Extreme weather events, the pandemic, rising inflation, labour force challenges and supply chain disruptions pose significant adversity for business owners.
Yet despite these challenges, Dr Retha de Villiers Scheepers points out that leading small businesses who are able to adapt and innovate their business models, can outperform their rivals.
In research that benchmarks the innovation capability and performance of Queensland businesses, as well as case study research with 20 Moreton Bay business owners, conducted in 2020 and 2021, Dr de Villiers Scheepers found that how firms responded to challenging conditions, such as a crisis, can set them up to survive – and even thrive – post-pandemic. Innovators who create more value for customers, and seek out new partners and new markets, may sacrifice short-term profits, but realise the return on their investment over the long-term.
“In the past, Australian businesses could safely follow international trends and introduce proven innovations to their local market, but COVID has accelerated digital adoption and increased the speed of decision-making,” Dr de Villiers Scheepers points out.
The question of how to innovate consistently and at speed is not an easy one to answer, but using innovation management frameworks and learning from other business leaders can help inform small business owners in their decision-making.
From research among Moreton Bay businesses, Dr de Villiers Scheepers offers some guidance:
1. Invest in yourself
Business owners, as leaders, are the decision-makers and play a pivotal role in innovation and business resilience. As such, they should invest in themselves, both in terms of professional development, and looking after their mental wellbeing. Professional development could range from short, online webinars to more formal qualifications. The new knowledge from such learnings often spurs on innovation initiatives. Mental wellbeing also matters, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that extremely stressful situations can either develop resilience, or have personal adverse effects, so creating balance and building in time to exercise and reflect is critical.
2. Involve staff in decision-making and idea-generation
During times of adversity, it might be easier to centralise decision-making as a crisis looms large, but involving employees has multiple benefits such as communicating care, empowering them, and gaining their front-line knowledge to generate ideas and implement changes that can make processes faster, or customers happier.
3. Seek out ‘downtime’ for innovation
Dr de Villiers Scheepers research found that businesses who used the COVID lockdowns as opportunities for experimentation and to work on developing ideas they didn’t have time to put into practice earlier, were able to innovate their business models and come out stronger. Beyond times of crisis, many successful businesses like Atlassian, 3M and Google give employees time and autonomy to work on innovation projects of their choosing. Small businesses do not have the luxury to provide as much time as these large businesses, but the practice of creating time and permission for innovation has long-term benefits.
4. Develop a learning culture within the business
Innovators are fast learners and bring in new knowledge and ideas, from formal sources, not just from customers or suppliers. For example, digital adoption means small firms need to learn and embrace cost-effective ways to provide value to customers and suppliers using digital technologies, as required. Digitalisation is pervasive and business owners need to constantly renew their skills if they want to keep up, but to take a market leadership role, more investment in learning is needed. This is one area that offers many innovation opportunities, but like others, it requires the business as a whole to embrace learning.
5. Act as a socially responsible business citizen
Research findings consistently emphasise the importance of business leaders embracing their social and environmental responsibilities in their respective communities. In times of crisis, like the COVID pandemic, the Moreton Bay region showed itself to be a supportive, close-knit community. Innovative business owners emphasised the importance of supporting local businesses, collaborating, and contributing to community. Being part of a supportive business community, or industry network, can help owner/managers to devise solutions to problems, and also respond to community needs.
Dr Retha de Villiers Scheepers is a researcher at UniSC with an interest focus on entrepreneurial decision-making in different contexts, specifically innovation. Retha teaches Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management across UniSC’s postgraduate business degrees.
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