INSIGHTS / Blog

We catch up with Tim Doidge, one of the mentors on our Innovation and Entrepreneurs Workouts, to discover what incredible business tool drives the programmes.

The Innovation Workout helps businesses with established products and services deep dive into their business model to uncover areas for growth and change through innovative thinking and a top-quality planning tool.

The driving force behind our Innovation Workout is the Business Model Canvas, a brilliant, strategic template that helps businesses map out what they’re doing to find improvements, solve problems, explore opportunities to scale-up, or uncover new areas for growth.

What’s key about the Business Model Canvas is that it’s not just used by early-stage start-ups, in fact, businesses of all sizes and stages use it. Worldwide business giants use the canvas to devise and test new models and ideas to stay ahead of their competitors. They are constantly thinking what’s next and where are we going to go? It’s the companies that are innovative that are the ones that succeed.

The Business Model Canvas we use in the Workout was designed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur from Strategyzer and is used at institutions such as Harvard Business School. It’s a widely recognised tool that can also be handed to investors, customers and staff members to demonstrate how your business operates.

It’s a reusable tool that creates space for reflection and creative thinking, opening conversations about change and telling the story of your business. It’s made up of nine boxes, with your value proposition in the centre, showing how all the areas of your business are connected. But where it differs from a business plan is that it’s designed to be a fluid, current document that constantly changes with each new idea or problem.

The canvas is an incredibly useful and visual tool to isolate a problem and work through it as a team, considering the whole business and any effects a solution might have on other areas. It becomes a go-to planning document for many businesses, revealing any pitfalls before money or resource has been spent investigating a new idea or solution.

A crucial point we tell businesses on the workout is that you shouldn’t try to fill each box and call it job done – as tempting as that may be. Every change you make has a knock-on effect around the whole canvas, so keeping it loose and flexible is important as it allows you to see if lots of different things are going on at the same time, maybe even in the same area.

As a business you can’t sit still. You need to constantly be looking at your return and trying to grow that, so the Business Model Canvas should be a tool you can use quickly and easily. Also, you don’t know who’s going to come in and try to replicate your idea or product, so you need to move quickly to reduce the risk and use the canvas to find the successes that need protecting by patents or copyright.

Many businesses do the same thing over again, hoping they will continue to see good results, but we empower them with the tools to help reinvent and invigorate small elements of their business that could have great results. It’s about seeing what works and what doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, trying again until it does.

I would thoroughly recommend the Innovation Workout as although it’s fast-paced, it’s very approachable for businesses across all sectors. It will equip you with new ways of thinking to help you become more innovative and drive growth. It’s a fantastic workout, backed up by fantastic tools and expertise, and I can’t praise it enough.

The next Innovation Workout is on 13 & 14 June 2022.

Apply for a place on our Innovation Workout

 

 

 

 

The Swindon & Wiltshire Digital Business Acceleration Hub and the SME Competitiveness programme are both part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.