Innovative strategic planning usually incorporates several company routines into a specific plan. These techniques provide departments within a small business with the ability to establish secure relationships among each other and with their clients. The process also helps the business tie its vital goals to a shared mission statement, while holding each department head responsible for that section's internal processes.

Goals-based Strategic Planning

The most common example of innovative strategic planning focuses on defining the company's goals. Goals-based strategic planning focuses on the company's mission statement, the goals the company establishes toward achieving that mission, the strategies used to reach those goals and the plan for a course of action. Techniques used in goals-based planning include identifying the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, establishing action plans and monitoring the company's progress toward its stated goals.

Alignment Model

When small-business owners see that their internal departments are working at cross purposes, they can attempt to get them back on track by employing the alignment model. The general intent of the alignment model is to make sure that each department works together to achieve the company's mission. This method of innovate strategic planning focuses on seeing that each department deploys its resources to conduct the company's operations in the most effective ways possible.

Scenario Planning

Many small business owners fail to take into account both best-case and worst-case business scenarios. When they employ innovative strategic planning methods to anticipate these scenarios, they can be better prepared in the event that these scenarios come to pass. Scenario planning considers future events that can affect the viability of a small business, as well as developing best-case, worst-case and reasonable-case scenarios around such events and determining a course of action for each potential scenario.

Organic Planning

Organic-based strategic planning methods use the company's vision and values, rather than goals and objectives, as their primary focus. The methods involved in organic strategic planning include articulating the company's overall vision and cultural values, examining the processes used to achieve that vision while complying with those values and relying more on "learning by doing" instead of on mechanistic procedures. The challenge in organic-based planning lies in how the company represents those ideals to investors who are more accustomed to more conventionally-structured forms of business planning.