There are some days when pursuing what appears to be a safe business practice or concept is really little more than recycling something that is known, has worked before but there are no guarantees that it will continue to work going forward.

More interesting for me are those businesses that build on what’s been done in the past, but do it in such a way that they create something quite new. Indeed if you’re breaking new ground you have permission to do things a little more out-of-the-box, the sides of the box have not yet been defined in fact you’re doing the defining as you’re going about things.

While it’s important not to reinvent the wheel, it’s also important to not be too derivative. Technologies and business that build on what’s known but take the opportunity off into a new, hitherto unnoticed direction are those who have the true potential to clean up big in my view.

Dr Terry Cutler in his time as Chairman of Arts Hub, often used to say to me – don’t follow the pack, be the market organiser. Do what you do differently enough that you can enforce a whole new way of looking at things in your market place. Even better, create that marketplace.

Just a little food for thought today. The word innovation is bandied around so often that I fear it sometimes loses its meaning. In my experience, you innovate when you build something new, interesting and useful beyond what is known and expected and accepted as being true.

Innovation can be jiggling old stuff around, but it's more than recycling worn-out concepts

And one more point on innovation. Some friends of the Into the Mountain crew have recently started a new business aggregating the resources and opportunities in the customer service space and they’ve invented a whole new term for what they’re doing. The business is www.clienteerhub.com and hats off to Ray Brown and Matt and Tim McDougall for creating a whole new language and canon around the area of customer service. Redefining something in an existing area in such a way that you unlock it’s real importance and give it the sort of value it should have had in the first place is really, really clever innovation. We wish the clienteerhub team all the best and we’re sure we’ll be talking more about their content and what they’re doing in the near future. For now check out their first clienteerTV interview with Ben Watson, Principal of Enterprise User Experience at Adobe.

Photo: flickr miguelpdl