Grow your ideas pipeline for a creative business

Are your ideas pipelines working to their full potential? Are they delivering consistent ideas into your business? How are you getting ideas regularly into your business?

Ideas are the lifeblood of business and great ideas grow businesses. And if you are on board with that, then you should be building multiple pipelines of ideas to feed your business growth – different paths that allow ideas to come from multiple sources into your business

So, how do you build your ideas pipeline?

If I were a plumber, at this point I may be sucking air through my teeth, shaking my head and saying with a rueful look: “It’s gonna cost ya.” But as the dripping tap in my kitchen will testify, I am no plumber, and ideas pipelines do not have to cost an arm, a leg or even a small finger.

In the Tool Shed this month is a checklist of 11 ways to build and sustain these pipelines, but this blog gives you idea number 12: do something different.

Whether it is just you in the business, or a team – or multiple teams – Do Something Different is a fantastic practise to help bring ideas to fruition and into your business. Doing something different can mean different things:

Make it a question

Just simply ask the question within your business: Can we do something different? Just because you have always done it this way, does it mean it is the best way? Explore doing this differently – from the way you onboard a client, to how you charge your customers. Come up with 5 different ways to do that thing, and explore if any of these ideas will reap bigger benefits for you or your customers.

Look at others

Ask this question of people outside of your business: how do you do this differently? Ask others in your industry, ask others in completely different industries – it will help you look at what you do and if there are better ideas you can evolve.

Go and do something different

And I mean REALLY different. Go and do a cookery course (unless you are a chef). Crack open a sketchbook and take a slot of time every week to draw something. Send your team to an art gallery. Have a Lego building competition. Read a magazine that you would never normally pick up. All these different things can feed your ideas pipeline – new experiences give you new ways of doing things back in your business. Be mindful to ask yourself: what inspiration can I take from this? What ideas can I borrow from this experience?

 I am currently doing a ceramics evening class, where there is no focus at all on planning, refining and chin scratching: the approach is get the clay, create, experiment and embrace the unknown (and the pots that look like someone has sat on them). This is a great idea and one I don’t practise enough in my business: get stuff going, know it’s not perfect, refine as you go.

So, Do Something Different – it is a great way to feed your ideas pipeline. If you want 11 more ways to build a pipeline, do pop over to the Tool Shed – it is our complimentary online membership area packed full of useful tools to grow your business. You can pop into the Tool Shed here.

Happy plumbing.