The world is drowning in noise, howling at us from phones, televisions, computers, and the universe of modern information sources. Consequently, terms like ‘innovation’ have lost their original meanings. To call a new product visionary, groundbreaking, and in fact, innovative is an ancient marketing tack. To seem unconventional has become conventional. But what matters isn’t marketing puff. What matters is the quality and the usefulness of the product.
In the face of a deluge of marketing hype, UK firms commit to original work, taking calculated risks and collaborating to build products that are not just promises. Instead of painting castles in the air, they are making products that are practical now, and that’ll be practical in the years to come.
Everett Rogers, the communications and marketing theorist, discussed the five elements necessary for the uptake of a new idea in his 1962 work Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers’ ideas have been revised for the online era. The Internet offers more channels of communication than in prior years. More businesses can use these channels. But their existence and number aren’t as important as their market share. Big companies dominate social media and their products inevitably spread to older (and still widely viewed) platforms like television news. SMEs, lacking access to the cash and marketing firms that bigger companies use, are shut out when they shouldn’t be. Still, UK SMEs devote time and energy to enhancing their firms and our lives.
The UK Economy’s Actual Champions
Commerce is a force for good. SMEs are the backbone of the UK’s economy. Of every 1000 people working at a UK business, 999 work at an SME. These companies consistently innovate, research, and collaborate with academic institutions, local governments, charities, institutes and each other. They access grants, expand operations, create new jobs, build new infrastructure and search for ways to lower costs. By working with each other and using novel ideas and methods, they’re continuously solving problems and bringing advanced, practical discoveries to market.
Concrete Examples of Real Innovation
In London, Entocycle builds insect farms to break down molecules which evade normal treatment.
Take Entocycle in London. Entocycle builds insect farms. Specialised insect farms that transform difficult-to-break-down chemical compounds into valuable proteins for agriculture and pet food. Entocycle is one of many businesses moving into this industry, an industry that’s a consequence of determined creativity. It’s the sort of work that’s buried beneath transitory social media posts and the kind of work that isn’t covered enough in the news media. But since particular molecules avoid treatment breakdown processes and end up in our waterways (and tap water), it’s the sort of work that’ll prevent us from ingesting harmful molecules via the water we drink.
One of the labs at Infex Therapeutics, an SME working on antimicrobial resistance
Take Infex Therapeutics in Alderley Edge. As bacteria become immune to the effects of antibiotics, a range of diseases become more dangerous. The issue is part of a broader problem known as antimicrobial resistance, a global threat to human health. Developing new drugs, rather than offering combinations (or alterations) of existing antibiotics, is creative. Infex aims to simplify and improve the drug development process at every stage, from ideas to trials, so humans will not revert to the pre-penicillin era when bacterial diseases were common and dangerous.
A Magtec-built electric truck: the firm pioneers electric vehicle systems for commercial and individual use.
Take Magtec in Alderley. For years, the company has been pioneering electric vehicle development. Their engineers are not just talking about self-driving vehicles and electronic transport. They’re building the drive systems that have made it possible. At its recently expanded manufacturing facility, Magtec employees design and build electronics, transmission systems, magnetic traction motors and other vital parts used in passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, trucks, bin lorries, trains and buses.
These companies are just three among thousands. They exemplify what’s happening across the UK: quiet developments of important products, too often overlooked in favour of flashier but less substantial developments.
These firms exist within nationwide and global networks. Commerce isn’t all competition. The notion that businesses must exist in a dog-eat-dog world is nonsense. SMEs cooperate as often as they compete. They are keen to form partnerships and do so. They work with smaller and larger businesses as buyers and sellers within supply chains. They share knowledge. The goal is mutual growth. As data shows, reciprocity makes firms stronger.
Trade credit, which many SMEs in the UK use, encourages interdependency. It helps enterprises expand. Short, flexible terms encourage frequent transactions between buyers and sellers. Trust is an implicit, important part of trade credit dealings.
A business selling on trade credit terms can use trade credit insurance to mitigate risk. Banks apply interest to loans. Interest compels debtors to pay under threat of financial penalty, so it is inherently punitive (or can be so construed).
Trade credit insurance protects creditors from bad debts without injecting mistrust into the relationship between a creditor and a debtor. A good trade credit insurance broker will work on a business’s behalf to help assess a potential customer’s creditworthiness. If a customer defaults, trade credit insurance brokers will ensure creditors receive immediate compensation.
For these reasons and more, trade credit and trade credit insurance underpins collaboration between SMEs.
Partnerships help businesses grow. All reliable data shows that everything that improves partnerships will improve a firm’s income.
The Wildfire of Hype
Most social media platforms make users like you, the product.
Digital technology has its place, but innovation doesn’t mean, nor should it mean, overpromising and under-delivering. AI, blockchain, NFTs, personal digital assistants, Segways, 3D TVs – these unduly vaunted technologies are near-endless. They’ve fuelled a wildfire of hype.
There’s marketing, and then there is outright deceit. Too often, marketing is deceitful, and products don’t work as advertised. People become disillusioned. They hear ‘innovation’, and instead of thinking about what we’ll do with the buildup of chemicals in our waterways, how we’ll ensure diseases don’t spread or how electric vehicles can work to reduce fuel and transportation costs, they think, ‘Google Glass’.
The Social Media Mirage vs Online Forums
Social media was hyped from the start, puffed up with the usual trite phrases: cutting-edge, radical, groundbreaking, visionary.
Not all social media platforms are the same, but too much is designed to distract. To keep you using it for as long as possible. To keep you scrolling, clicking, tapping, staring. Perpetual screen time 2.0.
You’ll rarely find high-quality content on Twitter/X. It does exist, but it’s buried beneath the mounds of the momentary. The shocking, the bizarre, the outlandish.
Twitter, like all social media, was hype from the start. Touted in recent years as a “digital town square”, a better comparison would be a digital Gin Alley. Even if we stick with the town square analogy, how often do you hear people in a town square discussing antimicrobial resistance? Or electric drive systems? Or ways to break down molecules into reusable products?
Few people go to town squares to listen to other people’s conversations. They go to the town square to shop or eat and then leave.
Instagram, Facebook and TikTok have helped decrease people’s attention spans. Victims of their objectives, they’re now forced to provide shorter, splashier material – most of it idiosyncratically toxic. It must appeal to base emotions. The content must degenerate. The cruder, the shorter and the more ridiculous it is, the more likely the platform will retain users. And that is their goal, as it has been from the start. They cannot sell user information to advertisers if they cannot keep users.
If you’re a business owner, you must be discerning with all the information you consume, especially social media.
LinkedIn is a social media network. It, too, will encroach on your user’s time. It is changing and will continue to change. As time passes, you’ll see new features that serve little purpose. You’ll see changes in the way information is displayed. However, as long as it lets people develop business relationships, it will remain helpful.
Web-based business forums are a superior alternative to social media networks. Forums include all the positive aspects of social media and very few negative ones. They let people and businesses connect and communicate. People share experiences and insights. All users have some ‘skin in the game’ as they’re all business owners or employees. You’re more likely to find exciting and innovative business developments via an online forum than on social media. A site that focuses less on aesthetics will devote more to function.
A good example: the UK Business Forums site. It has different subforums for different industries and a broad user base. Forums exist for specific industries as well. The UK Transport Forum is for businesspeople in logistics and transport-related sectors.
Whatever your business’s area, you can find a forum devoted to it. If you’re in the export industry, a search for “UK exporter online forum” or a similar combination of words will yield good results.
Although nothing beats face-to-face interactions, online forums (and, to some extent, business social media sites like LinkedIn) can help foster business relationships online.
The Path to Real Progress
Innovation thrives beyond the hype. Ignore it. Real progress happens in the minds and the offices of UK SME owners and employees. Their work may not grab headlines, but it shapes our future. To find true innovation, look past flashy marketing and social media distractions. Seek out the businesses tackling concrete challenges. Online forums offer a more focused alternative to social media, connecting industry professionals and fostering meaningful discussions about real innovation. While social media platforms amplify brief trends, forums encourage substantive exchange of ideas and collaboration.
Innovation. Collaboration. Risk taking. Risk management. Trade credit. Trade credit insurance. They’re all part of the same cycle. A cycle that leads to productivity. That will lead to your firm’s existence a hundred years from now. That’ll allow you to make more money and to use that money to enhance your products and expand your business. A cycle that’s far more important than any ephemeral sensation or social media gossip.
UK SMEs may not trend on Twitter, but their impact resonates far beyond the digital realm.
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