Good ideas - the kiss of death for innovation

Anti obesity or smoking campagnes don't reach the smokers or obese people. And it does not matter if you are exposed to all types of programmes promoting healthy cooking and recipes. The world is ruled by paradoxes. As is innovation. Because how strange this might hear, good ideas are actually very bad for innovation. It creates a one-dimensional focus on desirability and does not take into account the complexity and the boundaries of the playing field corporate innovations need to work with and within.

The whole notion that good ideas are killing innovation, was for me at first sight a bit of a strange conclusions when i was exposed to it by Micheal Schrage in the Harvard Business Review. After many years of working in this field and the necessary reflection, it sinked in and answered some challenges i faced in reality in a clear way. There is no shortage of good ideas in organisations, but on implementation power. In organisations in which 'good ideas' are high on the agenda, the performance of its innovation portfolio was not keeping up.

Micheal Schrage goes one step further: "Good ideas are actually the enemy of productivity. A focus on good ideas inflicts terrible damage - operational and emotional - on good manager and good businesses alike. Business ideaholics, not unlike meth addicts and other junkies, are always looking for the next fix. They crave the buzz, rush, or high that supposedly comes from injecting a really good idea into their managerial mainstream. Good ideas might be better described as the empty calories of enterprise innovation: accessible, tasty, and momentarily satisfying. But they're not good for you. They'll make you sick".

Though the rhetoric is in your face, i completely agree with the notion that good ideas are not at the heart of innovation.

Meeting - and talk culture

Because good ideas are in the center of attention, they also become the subject of deep discussions and analysis to understand how the idea can become even better. These companies, teams and individuals made improving ideas their core job when it comes to innovation. They fall in love with raw and exciting new ideas. They forget that they also need to be executed in a way that is viable and feasible. You can see it in the hype around A.I. I find it a fascinating development, which can bring us a lot, but it is not our next quick fix or salvation. That does not exist and how much we try to eliminate malevolence and ambivalence in our lives the harder it strikes back.

Professional innovators don't spend too much of their time to improve or identify good ideas, but they see testing the key assumptions in those ideas as their core activity. They implement, combining thinking and doing, through rigorous testing and creation of multiple prototypes. This is the real work. Setting up experiments, talking with customers, creating minimal viable products, identifying key metrics and administer careful the progress innovations make so causality of our interventions become clear.

“Successful innovation is a feat not of intellect but of will. Its difficulty consists in the resistance and uncertainties incident to doing what has not be done before.” Joseph Schumpeter.

Innovation amateurs talk about good ideas, innovation experts talk about testable hypothesis

Testable hypothesis create a complete different strategic conversation than talking about good ideas. First off all, it is about what you actually will DO, with whom will you test your idea and why? Second it gives you the perspective to ACT, and make progress. Progress over Perfection is a well know mantra in the lean startup movement.

Where is the accountability of innovation teams?

Often the missing puzzle piece is what the next concrete steps are after the team is done talking about ideas. Organisations should think and move around testable hypothesis. This is a first step in transforming to a healthy innovation culture. Why would you not put the discipline on your teams and agencies of creating testable hypothesis? That is how good ideas are transformed into real value. You also add a layer of accountability, because testing hypothesis is automatically connected with succeeding or failing. You learn from BOTH. But what is the accountability of a good idea? A popularity contest?

Steve Jobs his mouse

The young Steve Jobs wanted to create with his team a better and cheaper mouse. Jobs, in the early 70's, admired Xerox it's mouse, but in order to produce it you would need 400 dollars. In his search for creating a cheaper mouse, he understood he did now wanted to spend 25 dollars. He gave his design team to create the mouse and don't spend more. Dean Hovey, told he went to a supermarket and bought a couple of deodarant sticks. He hacked a simple prototype with Teflon and a ball. At the end of the day Jobs had a cheaper and more reliable mouse. The time and costs for materials for the experiment were lower than 1000 dollars. IBM and Xerox went into a much more expensive innovation process with design and developers, to produce a better mouse.

This example shows you that with less money to spend you force the team to become more creative in finding solutions for prototypes. A prototype, as in the example of Jobs, is another form of an MVP and has as a goal to test assumptions through experimentation. Not to launch the product!

An internal start-up culture? Buy 1 dollar for 50 cents

If you talk about customer development, lean startup, extreme programming, it is all about a couple of basic principles. To learn the most with the cheap experiments to figure our if your ideas can actually create enough value for consumers and to build a business around it. You want small teams with a shared responsibility and accountability when it comes about testing hypothesis. In corporations these teams need to work together but also compete, for example by giving topmanagement attention for those that have designed and executed the best experiments. How do i get an innovation of 1 dollar implemented for 50 cents? This thought is inspired on the famous aphorism from Warren Buffer. De method that Micheal Schrage introduced on top of this, is the 5x5 methodology.

Give a team of 5 people, five days to test 5 business experiments with a budget of 5000 dollars. This does not have to be implemented literally off course. It is a creative way to think about how to retrieve valuable insights for a good price.

Think about how Dropbox avoided to build a complete software program to see if people would buy and use it, and made a great video that explained the product and published it on Youtube. The rest is history. In my practice there a re thousands of inspiring examples on how to test product-or service ideas in a fast and cheap manner. The only obstacle are the beliefs that people have around ideas, the quality of good ideas, and when a good idea should move forward in the process. Progress over Perfection.