Sadly this is my third and FINAL entry to my innovation blog. The semester is coming to a close as well as my school career! Well for NOW anyways! I think we all can agree that education is never truly done, it is very important to further your education every chance you get, this will only in turn help you further your career, it will never harm you in any way! It may take up a lot of your time but it will never harm your career! I am set to get my degree the end of this semester and I must say it feels great, it feels like such an accomplishment and I know will pay off! I've already seen the effects of it, I recently was offered the Store Manager position at my place of work, (when I say recently I mean about 1.5 months ago)! I can only assume that they offered me this position based off my hard work, as well as my educational background, drive, and desire that I bring to the table!
I am sad to see this class end, I must admit when I first say this class as a requirement I kind of laughed at the title, I never really understood why they would have such a class created at all let alone make it a required course. I am actually kind of embarrassed at the way I envisioned the class, now after taking it I can honestly say that my outlook has changed 100000000%. I can see why it is a required class and that it should be, it brought a lot of different things to light for me and showed me how important it is to think differently! Thinking outside of the box brings so much to the table for my company and helps me keep an edge over my competitors! It truly is a great business class and I am sorry that I ever doubted or misjudged it! I truly am very thankful for having the chance to take this course and having such a great teacher that pushed us out of our comfort zone as well as pushed our creativity to the limit!
It is my goal to constantly bring something new to the table every month, even every day if possible! I am going to push myself to challenge my creativity and think outside the box. I will expect my employees to help me with this so we can bounce ideas off of each other! I feel visiting and secret shopping the competition at least weekly will help for us to stay on top of our game as well as instill different ideas and ways of twisting advertisements to target customers and draw in more business.
I think I still have a lot of work and growth that can be made when it comes to my creativity and innovation but I do feel that I have made a lot of headway in this area! I would grade myself on a scale of 1-10 a 8 for creativity and a 7 for innovation! I was able to push through my barriers by teaching myself to just let go! Understanding that there is no stupid idea and it is okay to "fail," every idea is a great idea and sometimes it just needs to be molded and tweaked and collaboration can definitely help there! I had to also take myself out of the equation and think from a customers perspective rather than from a manager and employee perspective, this helped tremendously!
My store is located inside of Bay Park Square Mall, and it is a Sprint location. As I've shared throughout this course there is much competition inside of this mall. For example: there is Cellcom, US Cellular, AT&T, Verizon so that is 4 so far, BUT then there is Radio Shack who sells AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, then there is Best Buy Mobile who sells AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and then directly across the street there is another Sprint store, so as you can see there is 10 different stores besides ours that sells cellphones services, and then there is 3 other just SPRINT stores within 1 mile of us, that creates quite the competitive environment!
One thing that I did come up with that was innovative for work, well that I believed was innovative. I came up with a way of streaming a slideshow on a constant loop to advertise sprint and offer some type of pop advertisement that would grab peoples eyes, our location had a disadvantage, it was brand new and no one knew that we were inside the mall, some people still don't know unless they have heard by word of mouth or just shopping inside the mall. So I thought throwing up a digital picture frame and then having a slideshow of our promotions and services streaming across it would be a great idea! It then progressed to having a 17in monitor displayed hooked up to a laptop which would offer more convenience to change or add any promotions that we'd like to the slideshow! It has really worked out great!
And so this sadly ends my blog entry and journal :-( Thank you for reading and thank you for pushing me mentally and creatively!
Shannon Demeny
