These Entrepreneurs Explain Why Innovation is at the Core of Every Successful Enterprise Innovation is the key to the exercise of finding solutions and is intrinsic to business success

Entrepreneurship, as it is known today, is primarily about finding solutions for challenging problems that exist. And innovation is the key to the exercise of finding solutions and lies at the core of every successful enterprise that we read, hear and study about. The sheer ability to look at problems and processes with a new perspective has led to some of the most innovative companies in the world.

Rewarding Path Of Creating Iterations

While initiating his venture, Monish Anand, Founder and CEO, Shubh Loans, was often reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos – "The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'".

"The whole approach towards lending to the marginalized segment of India required the acceptance of such a possibility first. It required us to re-imagine and begin from the point of marginalized segments being financially included. From there on, we built tools and banking environment that would allow such a scenario to exist in reality," shared Anand.

Every day, entrepreneurs and employees alike, face the heat for churning out innovative products and services. For Anand, being innovative is a mindset. "It's constantly about building your outlook towards problems and more importantly, trying and failing at solving those problems. Innovation is not about landing up with the best ideas; instead, it's about adopting the painful yet rewarding path of creating iterations after iterations," he opined.

Requires Time, Research And Patience

Rahul Sasi, Founder and CTO, CloudSEK, an AI-based cybersecurity risk management company, collects and analyzes (Machine Learning) Gigabytes of data from various sources every day. The company's data processing requirements were growing at an exponential rate every month. The immediate solutions were to purchase more processing power and sustain. But this was not looking like an economical solution long-term. This is when he was determined to find a solution, and decided to halt majority of his development process and invest 40% of the resource time to identify creative ideas and innovative solutions for this problem.

After two months of dedicated efforts, his team came up with an amazing distributed architecture where it started utilizing the processing power of the machines that were ideal and balanced the load.

"This solution now keeps our computing cost fixed and makes it possible to scale very easily giving us a competitive edge long-term. Hence innovation is very important, it's never an overnight process, it requires time, research and a lot of patience to build something remarkable," shared Sasi.

Key To Establish As Dominant Player

Debadutta Upadhyaya, Cofounder and CEO, Timesaverz, believes that innovation is key to establish yourself as a dominant player by creating a distinct identity in the age of cut-throat competition, more often than not fuelled by the prowess of marketing spends.

"Innovation can be around a product, services, processes, business model, operation techniques etc. that distinguishes "A" business from "B". Distinction being the hallmark of entrepreneurship, it is but imperative that innovation is at the centre of an entrepreneurial venture. In our case innovations have helped us sustain through the turbulence that the online home services sector has witnessed over the last couple of years while inching towards a profitable business index," he shared.

Upadhyaya innovated around business model, focusing on a balanced mix between B2B and B2C. In case of processes, he introduced the system of recharge from service partners to mitigate the leakage issues while primarily ensuring the best of service quality to end consumers and enhanced the UX by introducing an e-commerce kind of check out flow.

Instant Brand Recall

Innovation in entrepreneurship has always helped brands by changing with time and producing or extending new services or new products from ones that already exists. Ali Asgar Kagzi, Co-Founder and Director Genext, feels another factor that raises the importance of innovation in entrepreneurship is competition.

"It stimulates entrepreneurs to come up with much better offers in terms of services and price than their competitors and still be cost-effective and qualitative. Small businesses see the importance of innovation in entrepreneurship. Since they often compete with large Industry players, innovation is the utmost key to their sustainable growth. Over the period of time, entrepreneurs also need to push for uniqueness in their business as a competitive environment will lead them being clubbed with other companies, small or large. Innovative ideas, methods, and techniques come heavily into play for brand recall for any customer as well as for growth path of entrepreneurs," opined Kagzi.