You’ve excited your company’s war room and chosen your company’s new growth innovation.  This is your one great idea having the potential to significantly increase your revenue and create separation from your competitors.

Now what?  How do you turn this idea into a reality?

Large innovative companies like Proctor and Gamble, Intuit, Apple, and General Electric have developed elaborate systems turning innovations into successful products and services.  While most companies do not have the resources to create their own complex innovation centers, they can use many of their best practices on a more moderate scale.

Fortunately for us, these best practices have been documented in many places over the last decade, and they can be gleaned and applied by any organization with a motivation to innovate.

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Last week, we started a discussion on the importance of new ideas for growing your company and staying ahead of competitors.  Those organizations that innovate continue to grow while those maintaining the status quo tend to stagnate.

Innovation is difficult because it requires taking an idea and turning it into something.  There is no shortage of ideas.   However, there is a shortage of wisdom, knowledge, and focus for transforming ideas into innovations.

Wisdom is necessary to select the right idea.  Knowledge and focus are necessary to develop the execution framework and steps to turn the idea into an innovation reality.

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A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity of spending time with the executive team of one of the largest real estate organizations in the country.  It’s a great success story of an independent company starting small and eventually expanding operations into a region that encompasses 11 states.

While this company’s growth was not unusually fast (they started over 35 years ago), it was remarkably steady. They had a knack for marching into new markets and putting small, poor performing companies out of business.

I asked one of the executives how they grew so consistently and his answer was surprisingly simple,

“We had information to which smaller firms didn’t have access.”

He went on to explain how this information (collected mostly from his peers in professional networking groups) sparked innovations in his company.  The innovations, along with great business execution, produced the predictable and consistent growth.

Here’s the important question successful companies frequently ask:

How can we continue to innovate and capture growth opportunities in the future?

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Last week, I had the privilege of attending the 2015 Leading RE conference in Las Vegas.  This conference pulls together the leaders of many of the world’s most innovative real estate companies.

It was great to see our clients, friends and acquaintances at this event, and to build some new relationships.  My respect for longstanding companies successfully competing in the real estate industry continues to grow.

My admiration is rooted in the competition these firms overcome to stay in business.  In a local market, it’s often the small advantages that cause one firm to shine above another.

From a vendor perspective, there’s a constant flow of innovations coming to the market designed to give companies a slight advantage.  Some of these innovations are easy to implement and produce great results.  Unfortunately, these are also the ones quickly copied by a competitor.

What if your firm could come up with a competitive advantage that would quickly differentiate you from competitors and be very difficult to copy?  I’ll share one of these advantages today, and here’s the best news:  It’s free and doesn’t come with a pesky sales guy!

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