Expert urges SMEs embrace innovation for growth

• Published On: 06 April 2025 at 15:14

Demola Aderibigbe, CEO and Lead Innovator at Lalaa Consulting, has urged Nigeria's small and medium-sized firms to embrace creativity and innovation in order to grow and compete with larger industry players.

Speaking at the inaugural Academy of Creativity, Innovation, and Disruption event in Lagos, he emphasised the importance of SMEs leveraging these traits to compete with larger industry players.

Aderibigbe continued: "Most SMEs struggle to grow or survive beyond their formative years because they fail to adopt innovative approaches that could help differentiate their businesses in competitive markets."

Aderibigbe highlighted a 2023 National Bureau of Statistics research that found that 80% of Nigeria's small companies fail after five years.

According to Aderibigbe, a major cause of small business failure in Nigeria is a pervasive misperception about innovation. Many people wrongly equate innovation with costly technological solutions, ignoring additional cost-effective, practical techniques that can propel business growth.

"Many SME founders believe that innovation requires costly technology. But true innovation begins with creativity, which every business owner possesses. "The real challenge is learning how to use it strategically," he said.

He stated that the ACID project was launched to help SME operators bridge the essential knowledge gap in creativity and innovation, allowing them to better comprehend and use new ideas to drive business growth.

"Most of them are unaware of how crucial creativity education is for growth, and they need it even more than established companies," he told me.

Aderibigbe claimed that his company has reinvented traditional consulting models by adopting a Humour-based Gamified Consulting Practice, a creative approach that has garnered them top clients among Nigeria's most prominent corporate brands.

He went on to say that SMEs should start reinventing their goods, services, processes, and business models to fulfil unmet or underserved market demands, which are often disregarded by larger competitors. He went on to discuss how smaller enterprises have the capacity to disrupt markets and carve out long-term niches for themselves.

"Creativity is no longer a choice; it is a survival technique. The ability to think differently is what will distinguish the victors in today's rapidly changing economic world," he continued.

Aderibigbe urged SMEs to embrace platforms like ACID and others that provide practical innovation education, stating that such efforts could open up new avenues for corporate growth and resilience in a hard economic situation.