Some countries are better than others about respecting IP rights, but eventually, someone will try to copy your product. By staying constantly innovative, you can stay one step ahead of them—by the time they copy your product, you’ve already made it even better. The trick is to make sure your company stays innovative as it grows, instead of falling prey to hierarchies and rigid roles and processes.
To encourage innovative thinking throughout our company, we have an open door for people to bring ideas forward. Anyone from top to bottom can say, “Have you considered this or that?” We give our team space and time where they can research ideas.
We also hire people with an innovative attitude. Our employees have excellent educational and work qualifications, but innovation isn’t something you can put on a resume—it’s something you see in a person and how they behave, how they think, and what they’re passionate about. We hire people who look at possibilities, not the way things have always been done.
Interestingly, a lot of larger companies are finding it cheaper to buy innovation than to create it themselves because there are just so many levels of bureaucracy to push through even for small changes. But if you can maintain a small-company attitude towards innovation as you grow, you can remain agile. Our leadership meets, we go through all the pieces of the puzzle, and we decide then and there if it we’ll go ahead with something or we won’t. If something needs to be researched, it’s done immediately.