Make Progress. Kill Your Idea

4 Principles to Innovate Systematically and Avoid Innovation Waste         

Seriously, you should continue to work only on ideas you fail to kill, not on ideas where you intend to fail.

We keep being told that the path to progress is to fail—fast or however. That message is piled high with largely meaningless, branded keywords—agile, moonshot, blitzscaling, lean startup, and so on. And that message is dead wrong. The real path to progress is to kill your idea before you become so obsessed with what you think is “innovating”—and at any cost—that it destroys your creativity and muddies your thinking with minimum viable moonshot celebrations of failure

Seriously, you should continue to work only on the ideas you fail to kill, not on ideas where you intend to fail. But if you’ll just follow from the beginning, you’ll see that it makes all the sense in the world.?

The United States is famous for organizations that materialize?progress. In our history, there’s?Edison’s Menlo Park, Flagship Pioneering's Venture Lab, Ford’s factory, Xerox Park, and Bell Labs. Our gold standard, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), issues grand challenges and pursues bold, ambitious, difficult, and sometimes almost inconceivable projects—like the first self-driving cars decades ago. For most, it’s not just about software; many of these end up with some sort of manufacturing.

From that history, could we learn how to manufacture?innovation?itself? Could we do it the way we think of manufacturing products—in an?innovation?factory? Innovation that actually translates into new jobs and progress for all??In a systematic, efficient way?

Today’s efforts to reproduce the gold standard mostly try to?turn every idea into a single?product-guess,?then?prototype?away?and?run fast—perhaps, so no one notices when users become undercover, unpaid labor .?Google X has its product-seeking “moonshot.” So does Facebook’s Building 8. Amazon works backwards from a mock press release fixated on customers.

Compare that to Edison’s focus not on products but?results.

“I always start out with a definite idea of accomplishing a certain result. I collect all the data possible [and] proceed to sketch out every possible and probable way of attaining results and carry [the project] to success by experimenting. In other words, first plan—then act. I usually find that the first model is not at all what I had in mind … Any inventor knows this of course. I have found it necessary for this reason to build many models ….”[1]

Despite Edison’s simple “instructions,” almost every accelerator and incubator tries instead to anchor a product-guess—as if getting better at guessing wildly only needed practice— and mix together with a multidisciplinary team, makerspace, cool-sounding problem statement, and clever messaging to arrive at an innovation whatchamacallit that looks great on paper and scores poorly on just about everything else. They outsource product-guessing to enterprising talent who themselves hope to capitalize on dreams of quick wealth, turning the entire notion into some kind of brokerage service—so that no matter the idea, it can always be sold to the next startup-hungry investor that still believes in unicorns.?

In a century, we went from celebrating innovating as an industrious activity to embracing a shallow “legend of innovation.” At its root is a very human tendency to confound cause and effect. Want to?create?something new? Look for “creative” people—as if they were easy to find and would already know what to do.. Fear being disrupted? Go on offense! Seek “disruptive” ideas and disrupt first.?

Wait. When did “disruption” become synonymous with?progress??

All this is what complicates everything; myriad abstract questions must be answered before work can begin. Which idea will be “disruptive”? What’s the product-market fit? How do I find the?one? Is it helpful to call hard tech everything that doesn't immediately translate into a product? Understandably, modern managers are so afraid to lead through uncertainty or at all that they wait to be spoon-fed the?idea?so they can “execute” like robots.

Chasing after lone ideas is a lost cause. Some 9 of 10 new ideas produced and “validated” are doomed to fail after being funded. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a new gizmo, industrial development, policy, or organization—the rate is so constant it risks becoming an acceptable universal truth, like “flat earth” once was.?

"But why?" You might be tempted to ask. "Why do ideas or startups fail? if only we knew..." It turns out we know but few seem to pay any attention. In short, startups fail by design. Ever since the dot com burst 'failing' became the preferred method of choice for building new companies.

The alternative? If?newly minted ideas are doomed to fail, why not abandon any hope that a given idea will be good, start working with what you already have to flesh it out and prove it won’t work (in other words, “kill” it rather than “validate” it), and then—if successful—move on??

Here are four simple principles based on?thinking of idea production as an efficient industrious, systematic activity, not as some kind of fishing pond.

Principle 1:

It is irrational to fail in ways that could have been predicted.

For a concept to be “good” it must be made tangible, must work, and it has to thrive. Flesh it out to prove it wrong and make it indestructible by changing it until it resists anything thrown at it. The alternative—wishful thinking—is bad.?

Learn by being wrong —like Edison. Being the first to kill your idea is the sane approach.

Principle 2:

In the face of uncertainty, diversification is the only rational choice.

Things that look impossible are most likely simply unexplored. Risk comes from the uncertainty you leave hidden behind a shroud of increasingly narrow product-guesses. Instead,?streamline the idea to a hunch and?explore ways to survive different futures—making the endeavor diversified enough to withstand whatever.

Principle 3:

The most powerful asset of any idea is that it is malleable. Technology's strength is that it can be reshaped.

Nikola Tesla told an interviewer,

“Some people, the moment they have a device to construct or any piece of work to perform, rush at it without adequate preparation, and immediately become engrossed in details, instead of the central idea. They may get results, but they sacrifice quality.”?

Instead, he described keeping an idea in the back of his head for months, exploring possible solutions until he felt he was getting at the solution. “This feeling is as convincing to me as though I already had solved it. … In my mind, I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device ...”[2]

Principle 4:

Unless recycled, failed “ideas” create waste, pollute your innovating, and increase your cost.?

Things attempted once are easier to set up the second time around. That’s the way to overcome the scourge of innovation waste: myriad projects once believed disruptive and then abandoned halfway through. Whatever?you invest must help prevent further squandering.?The point is to learn a vastly disproportionate, even “unreasonable,” amount with the resources allocated.?“Lean” experiments turn out to be the most expensive, so instead, invest in and build whatever is needed to get to the truth about an opportunity. Make it affordable by creating economies of scale for innovating: manage innovation waste and learn to repurpose and reuse.

* * *

Whether you intend to solve a problem that matters to you, move deep tech to impact, or create an innovation group in your company these principles will set you to innovate efficiently in the same way as my MIT innovation students .

These principles will help you see innovating for the industrious activity it is. You can use them to set-up an innovation factory. By the time that innovation factory is fully operational, every past exploration will be making every next one easier and more ambitious: you get to test 10 opportunities meaningfully with the capital it would have taken before to fail (predictably) at one. Outcomes can be reused multiple times. Progress can be measured by the quality and low risk of the outcomes rather than the volume of product-guesses. Innovating becomes doing something new, starting with what you already have.

This mindset embraces uncertainty and sets you on firm?doer?ground. Being the first to kill your idea is a gateway to a realm of unexplored opportunities, a venture into the impossible that lets you start with what you already have.

[1] ?“Thomas A. Edison Speaks To You,”?The Electrical Experimenter?7, no. 8, December 1919.

[2] ?M.K. Wisehart, “Interview with Tesla,”?The American Magazine, April 1921.