Innovation within the Family Business – Creating the Right Environment

Listen to Randy Burns as he discusses the key to creating innovation within a family business. It is important in a family business, to be open to ideas from both family member and non-family members. Creating an open work environment will help ensure innovation and contribute to the success of the business.

Innovation, it was led by him. Again, we had numerous intellectual properties that made our company very, very successful. It started with a full polycarbonate shield, which no one had introduced at that time. So my father was really ground breaking when it came to these things, that came from his background, but he was very open to, not only ideas from his family, but from anyone who was working in the company, and I think if you spoke to anyone who had any experience working at iTech or Mission iTech, they would tell you that it was a fantastic work environment, because they could be heard. If they had something that they could bring, an idea, an innovation, people were very open to listening to it, starting with my father. A couple of ideas just over time is, certainly one of the products that we were the most successful with, and that was a very simple concept, and that was what we refer to as a Jock Plus, and that was a mesh jock short that had Velcro tabs on it, and it’s amazing how many of those units we sold. And that was something that was brought to us as somewhat of an afterthought and quite a few of us within the company were passionate about it, maybe not my father at first, but through some discussions it was something that clearly was a huge success for the company. Key Takeaway Be open to ideas, from both inside and outside the family.