Companies are no longer debating whether or not to innovate. They are focusing on how and when to do it. But where do you start? There are two ways to approach innovation: to find success in stability or to shoot for the moon.
In words of Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer, “the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea”. To really make an impact, it takes leaps of innovation and brisk experimentation. However, to make this happen, you will need more than just a crazy team member but a supportive, idea-sharing environment at your workplace. Enabling collaboration, ideas and knowledge exchange across departments, providing the management methods and digital tools that can support this – is the way to create an innovation petri dish of your own. When someone has an idea and has someone to share it with, it lays the foundation for further thinking and the search for different perspectives and opportunities rather than limitations.
What about slow and steady? Can they win the innovation race? Not every innovation has to be a breakthrough. In fact, most of innovation we witness today is a result of stable, routine hard work performed by people who tackle challenges on a daily basis. With a sense of shared purpose, they push the innovation locomotive further and further ahead, performing small yet no less important activities towards improvement and progress with endeavour and support from their colleagues. By taking a measured approach, innovators focus on day-to-day improvements whilst protecting their core business to continue to generate profitability.
Innovation for R&D purposes is not about one or the other, it’s about both. We at RandDTax pride ourselves on having expertise over a wide range of R&D activities, which are either stable in their progress or incredible in their realisation.
We have mechanical engineers whose day-to-day work is to explore new methodologies and test new materials to achieve their performance goals. Yet we also have projects where a giant ice-cream tab is floating in the sky or where a room can sense your feelings and match them with a colour. So, whether you are a precision engineering company finding new solutions to day-to-day technical challenges or a completely new type of innovative business aiming to pursue impactful insights, you may be carrying out qualifying activities.
Whichever road you take, there’s no right or wrong turn, it’s a way ahead, no matter how many times you have to stop or go back to the start. Even if your project is ultimately unsuccessful, yet the solution was not evident from the start, you may still qualify for a valuable source of cash to reward your trial-and-error path.
Get in touch with us via timwalsh@randdtax.co.uk or book a calendly call for expert friendly advice on the R&D tax relief scheme or to discover your R&D tax credit options.
Book a call with Tim Walsh : https://calendly.com/conversation-with-tim/20min