This weekend we went to Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my favourite places in the UK, for various reasons. One of these reasons is the Adnams Brewery, based in Southwold. It’s been going for over a century and has always produced wonderful beer (as well as other drinks).

But a few years ago I noticed a new range of beers in the shop. It’s a new brand – “Jack Brand” in fact, and includes 4 or 5 beers, all of which I can happily say are really interesting, new beers. They are to an extent riding the wave of “Craft beers” of various sorts, the beers are often quite hoppy and will appeal to customers who like that sort of thing (including me), but that’s not quite the point.

The thing that’s most impressive is that a company working in what is generally perceived to be quite a staid industry has managed to do some interesting commercial innovation. And they’re a small company too, I doubt they have enormous research departments to look in to this sort of thing.

They’ve innovated in terms of the product (they’re not just re-labelling something else, but have come up with new, different tastes) and the brand. I also like the names of the beers (e.g. the one pictured – “Innovation IPA”!).

And I’m pretty sure it’s been very successful – I’ve seen the beer in a lot of pubs in Cambridge and it seems to be doing well.

So, if a brewery can do it, why can’t you? If they’ve managed to get their marketing team and their brewers together and come up with something this successful, what’s stopping you from doing the same? Of course there are 10s of thousands of articles and books on how to get the innovation process going, how to manage it in a standardised way and so on. But I’m not sure it’s that complicated – I’d be surprised to learn that the small group of people at Adnams spent months instigating a complex innovation process at the office.

So the question is, what’s stopping you re-creating something like this in your business? A new representation of an existing product? A new, innovating way of using your product a different way? A new pricing system (monthly payments, daily even, free for non-commercial etc etc!?)? A radically cheaper, stripped down version for a different market? Or a much more expensive version with added services for a different market? Different brands for different groups of customers? Combinations of your products for different people?

And the list goes on – many of these innovations are easy to implement, but they’re often not easy to make happen, particularly in larger organisations.

And maybe that’s why Adnams managed to do this so easily – they’re a small company, presumably with little red tape and a culture where these things can happen without too much pain. What can you do at your org to foster this sort of activity? Do you block new ideas or nurture them? What can you do to help?