Small Business Advantages for Innovation

Intuit and Emergent Research recently released a research brief on small business innovation.

A key finding of the research is that small businesses have six inherent attributes that make them natural innovators. These include:

• Personal passion: Personally invested, most small business owners are willing to try new approaches to make their business more successful.
• Customer connection: A deep and direct relationship with the market and customers helps small businesses understand customer needs, identify new opportunities, and fix problems quickly and efficiently.
• Agility and adaptation: Unlike large corporations, small businesses can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and implement new business practices.
• Experimentation and improvisation: When pursuing new opportunities, many small business owners and managers aren’t afraid to experiment and improvise, accepting failure as part of the path to success.
• Resource limitations: Small businesses are adept at doing more with less. And these resource constraints lend to their innovative mindset.
• Information sharing and collaboration: Small businesses traditionally rely on strong social networks to share information and inspire innovative thinking. Online social networks extend and amplify this practice.

The entire report and related materials are available at www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness.

(Hat tip to Steve King, who published this post on the AppGap)