What does innovation mean to us?

Some of you may know that I've just been named last year's winner of the Innovation category at the Swansea Bay Woman of the Year Awards, which is very exciting! But what does "innovation" really mean, on the ground, to a company like iCreate?

"Innovation" is a popular buzz word these days, and many organisations (ourselves included) have been bandying it around our marketing literature for some time. And I used to be as sceptical as anyone about what this "keyword" actually means, in the real world, on a day-to-day basis, within ordinary companies. But over the past couple of years, the experience of the current recession has perhaps taught us something about it, and today, at iCreate, we have a clear understanding of how we can be truly "innovative", day in day out.

Most start-up businesses are innovative to some extent, often founded on an idea of how to do, make or supply something better or different, better or differently. But once in business, with a customer base and a successful product or service, it's easy to get comfortable and begin to stick with what you know... If it's working, why try and change anything?

But like many businesses, iCreate has been shaken out of any sense of complacency by the recession. Faced with a declining market, firms have had to become more proactive about their sales, marketing and product development in order to survive the downturn.

We could see that our existing customer groups were stopping or slowing their building projects as the property market got crunched, so, at iCreate, we brainstormed. That concept seems a bit dated these days, but there's nothing quite like a boisterous team brainstorm to get ideas flowing and get engaged with the problem at hand. Faced with the economic crisis, we effectively held our own crisis meetings at iCreate - group discussions about how to respond to the changing climate, which sectors of the market to target, and what to offer, in order to ride out the recession.

Out of these discussions emerged a variety of new ideas - "innovations" - that we decided to try and pursue. And one good thing you can say about the recession: we had time to spend on business development activities, with less client work to fill the schedule.

With more downtime available, we were able to start "investing in R&D", which sounds very grand but actually just means allowing our team the time to spend on learning new skills, techniques and processes to improve what we could offer our clients. We were motivated by the need to offer our customers something different and better than they could get elsewhere, to give ourselves the edge in a more competitive environment.

Out of this process have come a good number of innovative products and services - most notably our new iViewer application for delivering interactive 3D environments, but also our revolutionary approach to working with regeneration agencies, our email marketing solutions for housebuilders, and our advanced 'verifiable' architectural visualisation services for architects. These new offerings really have put us ahead of the game, and now enable us to compete in a global marketplace, securing some of the world's most presitgious property development projects.

So it makes me think that even when we're busy, we must somehow make time to "invest in R&D", and avoid that old temptation to settle into a comfortable routine. By continuing to innovate, we can be confident of retaining our position as one of the UK's leading architectural visualisation firms, but if we stand still we're in danger of getting left behind in such a fast-moving high-tech industry.

But surely "innovation" doesn't just relate to the development of new processes, techniques and technologies - we've tried to apply an 'innovative approach' to all aspects of running the business. Is there a better way to manage projects? A better way to communicate with clients? A better way to organise and analyse our data? A better way to spend our marketing budget? By taking the time to think a bit harder about what we're doing, and looking out for opportunities to save or maximise on things, we're being innovative without really thinking about it.

For us, innovation is about Always Moving Forward. I think it comes out of a natural instinct to survive, which kicked in a couple of years ago and has kept us on our toes ever since... Hopefully we're now better placed for 2010 than we would otherwise have been - and we're busier than ever so that can't be bad!