A Simple Path to Innovation

With so much noise surrounding the “best way to be innovative,” it’s easy to forget that the path to innovation can be simple. In today’s B2B Marketing Agency Insights, CEO Austin LaRoche breaks down the path to innovation into the three simple steps B2B businesses can follow to become more innovative.

Video transcription below:

Welcome back to B2B Marketing Agency Insights. I am your host, Austin LaRoche, CEO at ATAK Interactive. Today, I want to talk about innovation and a simple path to it.

The other day, I was interviewing an applicant for a position and doing what I always do. I was going through some of our core values, and one of those touched on innovation. I asked him where he had displayed some innovative techniques in a past job.

He slightly stumbled and said, “Like, man, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m an innovative person.” I was like, “Okay, expand on that.” He said, “You know what? When I get into a project, I do so much research. I get like my hands on everything. Once I do research, then I start looking at what the right way is. I start doing that and getting those reps in. Once I have that, then I just do things a little bit differently. I try and take some chances. Then I go after something new.”

I just started laughing because it brought me back to the days when I started my first agency, which was more social media-driven. I would always tell clients that that path to innovation was simple. It was: evaluate, emulate, innovate.

The idea was always to, first, evaluate what you are doing and then evaluate what everybody else in the industry is doing. I don’t really love competitive analysis, but again, this is just a simple path to innovation. It’s not THE path to innovation – there are lots of different ways – but you want to look at what the competition’s doing and then see who’s doing it right.

From there, you start doing it right too. You start getting those reps in, and before you know it, you are doing everything right. You are doing things the way that the other people in the industry are doing.

At that point, that’s when you get to take chances, that’s when you get to take the next level. You would make that next jump. It is such a simple, simple path. It is not the only path. But if you are wondering, “How do I even start to become innovative? How do I become innovative in anything that I do?“, just take that path, evaluate the landscape, see who’s doing it right, and do it the way they do it.

There’s this famous story about Hunter S. Thompson and how he hand wrote Old Man and The Sea so that he could know what it was like to write a great novel, like Ernest Hemingway. That’s the sort of emulation that you want. Once you can do that, you can go all Gonzo, do your own thing, be innovative and take it to the next level.

So if you’re stuck, trying to figure out how to do something different and innovative, just try that simple path: evaluate, emulate, and then innovate. For everybody else at ATAK interactive, I’m Austin LaRoche saying, good luck growing.