Boldly bolster your business, make your mark in the marketplace, and inspire incredible innovation, all through internal investment.

When it comes to growth, executives normally only consider business mergers and acquisitions, organic growth through the increase of sales and the investment in plants and equipment as the key to grow a business. But what if there was another potent way that is being severely overlooked?

So you have reached the stage with your business where you are financially stable and you now want to expand. You have a modest amount of financial capital available, so you could consider re-investing it into machinery, plants or property, you could consider purchasing up or down the supply chain; such as your supplier or client. Or, you could also consider a third option, recently started by Zappos.com.

Who knows your business better than your employees? They work there every day, they know what works well and where it could be improved. They know your customers personally, and when your customers have problems they tell your employees about them, which is a brilliant source for product innovations. Your employees also got hired because they are good at what they do. So instead of looking for outside opportunities, invite opportunities from within your business.

Create a programme where employees can pitch their own business ideas, and invest in the ones deemed suitable. This could be created as an annual competition where a prize of a certain amount of money and/or resources is made available for the winning idea, or an ongoing programme which takes on ideas all the time.

The real power from this strategy comes when you start launching multiple projects and organisations. A lot of Google´s growth came internally where employees were empowered to create new ideas.

Depending on how much your company has available to invest, resources could be set aside for:

1) Prize money

2) Investment capital for the business project

3) Mentoring and support

4) Business incubation and growth

5) Financial capital for future competitions and/or business investment programme

In 2011 Zappos.com held the Zfrog awards, where employees pitched their own business ideas for support. This not only encourages growth and development but also recognises employees and offers them incentives "to go the extra mile".

A company would be wise to have a mixture of inward and external investment, with the goals of developing both intangible and tangible assets.

The more open you are to ideas and innovation, the more likely you are to change to the environment. As Darwin pointed out, the species that survived weren´t just the ones that adapted, but the ones that adapted first.