Tips for Innovation

We were contacted by a national magazine on entrepreneurship last week for tips for innovation. I polled the team for their thoughts. Here are our top three tips.

#1 Talk to Outsiders
A great way to innovate is to ping your ideas off really smart people outside your company as well as inside. All of our companies work in an open floor plan, giving each entrepreneur access to more than 50 other startup people to bounce ideas off and get reality checks. Every day these entrepreneurs drive innovation with input from one another.

#2 Feed Your Passion for Learning
When experts talk, listen! People have been where you are. You can get innovative ideas listening to them talk about their experience and expertise. For example, every week DreamIt Ventures brings in top speakers on topics such as marketing, software development, venture capital financing, user interface and experience design, PR, and more. The objective is not only getting entrepreneurs to learn information critical to the success of their business, but also to expose them to ideas that will stoke their innovation mojo.

#3 Experiment Quickly, Encourage & Reward Risk Taking
Innovation must be sown into a company’s culture. The only way to ensure this is to reward successful risk taking and accept the occasional failures as part of the creative process. All innovators fail at one time or another, but you can’t innovate if you don’t try. The key is to iterate on ideas quickly and make sure you are being as capital-efficient as possible. Burn up your intellectual capital faster than your financial capital, and reward risk taking.