Big ideas come from insights that center on solving customer problems. Not everyone would exercises agree with this; some think that the best ideas come from wild and woolly brainstorming, unfocused ideas that get way “outside the box”. However, the facts speak otherwise. Researchers have shown that over half of the commonly used brainstorming techniques, intended for corporate creativity, don’t work and can actually take you completely off point. Amongst the worst are activities that focus solely on imagination, expression of feelings, free associations and imagery. These tools may actually reduce the output of ideas that can work.
The corporate suggestion box can similarly be a black hole that stifles innovation as soon as employees figure out their best ideas frequently end up in oblivion. Ending up with too many unfocused ideas wastes precious time and resources. The result is a struggle to evaluate, sort, categorize and then manage all these random submissions, in a vain attempt to select the ideas “most likely to succeed”. No wonder, a 2010 Denning Dunham study revealed that only one in twenty five business innovation initiatives meet with any degree of success.
Similar problems arise with online forums, ideation programs, venturing units, and various other schemes to generate ideas. What they all lack is context and a framework for guiding creative energy. None of these concepts work in isolation; they all need to be part of a process, a synergistic system.
Structuring A Process
As a rule of thumb, most corporate innovation starts out with a bang and then dies quicker than the latest business fad. Why? One reason is that people find it easier to put forward ideas they already have than to go to the critical work of coming up with new ones. “Thinking is hard – - that’s why so few people do it” Henry Ford is reputed to have said.
A second reason is that not enough commitment is given by senior management to make the initiative work: “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” Without real leadership, very little of anything goes anywhere.
Third, innovation happens too often on an ad hoc basis rather than as a business process. Periodically, serendipity and good luck produce surprisingly good results. However, these one-hit wonders – - because of their very success and monetary reward – - only set the company up to fail later. Random success cannot be duplicated. When the one-hit wonder dies of old age, the infrastructure to support it becomes a very heavy burden that too often sinks the company.
Sustainable innovation that can drive the business forward needs to be set up as a system (in which skill, expertise and knowledge are deeply embedded into the enterprise). Without such a system the output will be sporadic at best. Learning will turn out to be negligible, execution will be mediocre and results anemic.
Further, without an in-place system (including well-structured, highly-committed innovation teams) employees will constantly face capacity, time and motivation issues around their participation. Such ad hoc innovation will usually lead to continuous power struggles for needed resources.