LIFE OF BUSINESS - Knowledge Bar #Business Ideas

Are you struggling with growth in today's complex business environment?

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 16:00:38 +0930

How to Manage Complexity without Getting Complicated

Does your business manage complexity by making things more complicated?

If so, you are not alone. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 2019, highlight a concerning trend of increasing complexity in the business environment, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs). The findings indicate that business complexity has grown 6 times over the past 6 years, while SMBs have experienced a significant increase in complicatedness, measured by structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems. An it is increasing by a factor of 35%. This complexity can have several negative consequences for SMBs:

• Productivity Challenges: As the business environment becomes more complex, SMBs may struggle to streamline their operations and improve productivity. The multitude of structures and processes can introduce inefficiencies and hinder effective decision-making.

• Innovation Bottlenecks: The complicatedness can make it difficult for SMBs to foster innovation within their workforce. When employees are burdened with excessive layers of bureaucracy and the lack of decision-making understanding of innovative approach, it can stifle creativity and slow down the implementation of new ideas.

• Workforce Disengagement: The business labyrinth created by increased complicatedness can disengage and demotivate the workforce. With excessive structures and processes, employees may feel a lack of autonomy and empowerment, leading to decreased job satisfaction and lower levels of engagement.

To address these challenges, it is important for SMB leaders to recognise the impact of the increasing complexity and take steps to simplify and streamline their business. This may involve reevaluating and simplifying their roles, processes and systems, empowering employees to make decisions, and fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Additionally, leveraging technology and digital tools can help automate routine tasks, improve communication, and increase efficiency within SMBs.

LIFE OF BUSINESS specialises in navigating the complex challenges that come with growth, that's why we have built a factory to nail it down and we have a proven track record of success. Let us take the burden off your shoulders and help you achieve your business goals.

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The Breakthrough Ideas are the Key in Long Term Success.

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 12:22:41 +0930

One of the common problems in innovation is "Not thinking Long Term" about Innovation Strategy focusing on breakthrough ideas. Most businesses tend to focus more on short term goals & results than thinking from a long term perspective of achieving something different but right. Studies show that around 60 to 80% of new products fail due to lack of innovation strategy as a basis for decision-making and lack of market orientation. Breakthrough innovation is complex enough, with a high level of uncertainty to come by. However, the one who has achieved breakthrough innovation is one who is leading us.

Today's, thanks to breakthrough technologies, we have more new ways to connect, analysis, synthesis and find different minds across the globe to complete and mature our hunches and thoughts that we are working on to build and validate our ideas. The historic increase in connectivity aligns with our ability to reach out and exchange our ideas with others have allowed us to get to know other people hunches and combine them with our ideas to develop our ideas into new mature ideas.

There is a reoccurring pattern of a slow hunch that causes breakthrough ideas to come from the back of people minds. It takes significant time sometimes years or decades when an idea becomes mature enough to be successful for the owner. The actual viable ideas come from the collision of small fragmented hunches that they form something bigger than themselves. That's why we should make our mind collision to other minds to form another half of missing ideas in the form of conversation, experimental collaboration, prototyping development, co-thinking and co-creation overtime. Breakthrough ideas need time to incubate and grow organically, and whether or not, it is a complex process.

Thought in the form of a hunch is a single deep thinking process that often happens in a wonderful, illuminating moment but the thought is a major complex network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside our brain on the most elemental level. The outside network forms mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of a human brain.

LIFE OF THOUGHT Innovation Factory

We need a system to allow hunches to come together to form a big viable idea and then identifying a minimum viable idea to start the experiment process. The main challenges are How to create an environment that allows hunches to have long half-life to incubate and collide with other minds in today's workplace or virtual world? And also, How to enable our hunches and thoughts get connected with other people thoughts to form a new mature viable idea that is relevant to a need, novel and adaptableLIFE OF THOUGHT was born out of the primary human engine of creativity and innovation in 2003 during years of incremental development in an unstructured way. Now LIFE OF THOUGHT is a front-end virtual innovation factory to create, develop and enhance breakthrough ideas in Co-Thinking and Co-Creation systematic way for those who need to invent or innovate new product, service or solve a complex problem.

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Building a safety habit during Covid-19 in an Organisation

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 12:21:49 +0930

Safety Punch Card Idea

Building a safety habit during Covid-19 in organisations in 2 months.

A behaviour or action becomes a habit when it goes and stays in our subconscious mind not only be conscious about it. One of the ways to build a habit in our subconscious mind is repetition, and it can take an average of 66 days for a person to form a new habit (Atomic Habits by James Clear https://jamesclear.com, New York Times bestselling book). For example, we are changing gears in a manual car without thinking much about it. For change a behaviour, James is saying we should answer these four questions.

How can I make it obvious?
How can I make it attractive?
How can I make it easy?
How can I make it satisfying?

My Idea: Writing is more effective than speaking, and the idea responds to the above changing habit four questions.

Safety Punch Card - Building a habit of Covid-19 safety in 2 months

This is only for people who have to be physically at offices or sites. The idea comes from Clock card machine or punch clock when we arrive and leave an office. It is now "Safety Habit Recorder" for Covid-19 where everyone writes a post note on a whiteboard/office board when they arrive and leave office/site by answering 4 questions that record the start and end times of everyone Covid-19 safety Habit during a day for 2 months.

Write on post note (Your name + date + Question No + Your response to each question on a whiteboard or an office board every day.

At the start of a Day:

1. What am I going to do today to keep myself and others safe? For example, follow 1.5 distance, Telling others out loud, using a Rubberband to remind me

At the End of a Day:

2. What have I done today to stay safe?

3. How many time did I notify or remind others to stay safe?

4. What else could we do together to keep safe?

The action of an organiser of each site/office in Every day:

Take a photo of the board
Post the photo on the Workplace group every day from different sites
Reward/endorse the most useful and interesting idea or action or answer

It can start with only question 1 then and gradually adding the questions 2,3,4 over days to improve it.

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The Innovation Challenge Nailed

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 12:21:33 +0930

We all know Innovation matters, but...

The top challenge is the innovation has been a top priority and a top frustration for many organisations, businesses and leaders. According to McKinsey, 84% of global executives believe innovation is extremely important to their business survival and growth but only 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance and result. Most people would agree that the vast majority of innovations fall far short of ambitions.

One of the fundamental problems is, most of the masses of customer data companies create is structured to show correlations such as this customer looks like that one, or 68% of customers say they prefer product A to product B. While it’s great to identify patterns across the data, they don’t mean that one thing actually caused another. Also, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t causality, we believe most managers have gone through basing decisions on correlations or leave it to a chance to innovate.

LIFE OF THOUGHT Innovation Factory Model

LIFE OF BUSINESS believes the innovation success happens in the Art & Science of Idea Transformation through mindset, strategy, practice and system together over time. Finding a novel solution comprises up to two-third of the total cost, time, and effort of new development.

However, every business has an army of potential creators and innovators at its disposal, not only its staff but customers, suppliers, partners, professional networks such as business communities, social networks such as fans and beyond especially in today's interconnected world.

LIFE OF BUSINESS is a Micro Digital Innovation Factory as a Service to enable individuals and businesses to innovate a new solution, concept, product, service, system or business model together through the Art & Science of Idea Transformation in a systematic way that can not be found anywhere else.

Maybe this is the time to think laterally and reinvent yourself and the business to do something smarter that matters the most in a systematic way.

Let's discuss to see how can we turn your challenge to an opportunity that matters the most.

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The Ultimate Guide of Business Idea Managment

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 12:19:11 +0930

Micro Idea Factory For Small Businesses

Creating Business Idea Management and Development for a Small Business involves compiling comprehensive insights and actionable strategies that cover every aspect of nurturing and implementing business ideas. Below is an outline that encapsulates the core components of such a guide:

Step 1: Cultivating a Culture of Innovation
Encouraging creativity within your team
Tools and techniques for brainstorming and idea generation
Creating a safe space for sharing ideas

Step 2: Setting Up an Idea Management System
Introduction to idea management systems
Criteria for selecting the right tool or platform
Integrating the system into daily operations

Step 3: Collecting and Organising Ideas
Techniques for effective idea collection
Categorizing and prioritizing ideas
Keeping track of all submissions

Step 4: Evaluating and Selecting Ideas
Establishing criteria for evaluation
Involving stakeholders in the selection process
Feedback mechanisms for non-selected ideas

Step 5: Prototyping and Testing
The importance of building prototypes
Cost-effective methods for prototyping
Setting up a testing process
Learning from feedback and failures

How might we test an idea in the smallest way possible?

In a large interconnected system and in a complex situation with a highly dynamic environment/organisation (sometimes highly politicised) it is challenging to be successful in a pilot implementation even in small scale.

The main pilot implementation focus should be on identifying innovative solution (idea) implementation and business adoption Issues, Challenges and Risks not the solution design flaws. The innovative solution design or idea testing issues should be identified in a simulated test environment or in the prototyping phase. So in the pilot, we shouldn't test the idea from a design point of view.
From an implementation point of view, the Lean Pilot Validation approach as the best. The initial pilot should be deep but not broad (I called it Minimum Viable Pilot). The Depth in the first min pilot allows us to go in a deeper level of business impact, requirements + risks discovery, potential process changes and better user adoption and visualisation of end to end sense of solution at the first round of min pilot. For doing the Minimum Viable Pilot, we should create a target environment like a dome. Minimum Viable Pilot goes in-depth in a Business Environment Dome where is the Minimum current real environment with a focus business group and minimum business systems as possible (even though everything is interconnected) to turn unknown to known in a small protected environment (under the Dome) then iterate the implementation or scale up from there.

Step 6: Planning for Implementation
Creating a detailed action plan
Resource allocation and budgeting
Risk assessment and mitigation strategies

Step 7: Execution and Monitoring
Best practices for efficient execution
Monitoring progress and adapting as necessary
Keeping the team motivated and focused

Step 8: Scaling and Growth
Identifying opportunities for scaling
Strategies for growth and expansion
Innovating on existing ideas

Step 9: Learning from Success and Failure
Analysing outcomes and extracting lessons
Celebrating successes and understanding failures
Continuous improvement and iteration

Step 10: Building a Sustainable Innovation Pipeline
Ensuring a continuous flow of ideas
Long-term strategies for innovation
Leveraging partnerships and collaborations

End: This guide aims to be a comprehensive resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking to harness the power of innovative ideas to drive their businesses forward. It covers everything from the initial generation of ideas to their implementation, monitoring, and scaling, providing a roadmap for sustainable business growth and innovation.

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