| 
Beware the Cult of Ideas
The Cult of Ideas is a dangerous cult lurking within the field of corporate
innovation. It is a disturbing cult in which members worship massive numbers
of ideas above all else. On the surface, this seems a good thing. After all,
innovations are founded on ideas, are they not? So, if a company wants to innovate,
the more ideas it creates the better. Sadly, however, the ugly truth is that
the cult of ideas can actually stifle creativity and inhibit innovation.
What is the Cult of Ideas?
The Cult of Ideas is the worship of large numbers of ideas above all else in
innovation. You see it when Starbucks proudly proclaims that they have received
over 100,000 ideas from their on-line suggestion web site. You see it when IBM
brags of Idea Jams that generate many tens of thousands of ideas. You see it
whenever a company boasts of an innovation initiative solely based on the number
of ideas collected.
It is easy to understand why the Cult of Ideas has grown so powerful in recent
years. Most senior managers come from analytical backgrounds, often with MBAs
from prestigious university. And that background has generally served them well
as they manage operations in ever more complex businesses.
Unfortunately, finding meaningful numbers in the innovation process can be
tricky. Technology and pharmaceutical companies can count their patents –
and many do. But patents fail to measure operational efficiency and business
model innovation, which are also important. Moreover, many innovative firms
take out few if any patents. The number of new products launched every year,
or the income generated by products introduced in the past five years is another
approach for measuring product innovation – but it also fails to recognise
other forms of innovation. Moreover, a visit to any supermarket suggests we
must question whether the introduction of new products truly represents innovation.
A look at all the variations of Nivea shampoo products, many of which claim
to be “new”, for instance, is hardly indicative of product innovation.
So managers have latched on to the counting of ideas and the assumption that
lots and lots of ideas must be a good thing. This has been enhanced by innovation
service providers who also espouse the notion that more ideas are better than
fewer. And from this situation has grown the Cult of Ideas.
Innovation Consultants Also to Blame
The Cult of Ideas is not inhabited only by analytical senior managers. Many
innovation consultants, familiar with brainstorming methodology and creative
problem solving, have learned to stress the importance of generating a lot of
ideas in hopes of finding a few gems. Brainstorms, for instance, are often judged
by the number of ideas generated. Likewise, idea management software vendors
will boast about the number of ideas their software can generate, conveniently
forgetting that it is employees and not the software that generates ideas.
Why Is This a Bad Thing?
Why is the Cult of Ideas a bad thing? Of course ideas in their own right are
not bad at all. I should know, I have lots of them myself. So many, I sometimes
want to switch them off. Indeed, it used to concern my girlfriend that I would
always come up with ideas about new businesses to launch, new activities to
do and new paths to follow. These ideas worried her. Surely, she thought, it
could not be a good thing for me to do so many things or to throw away everything
I have done professionally in order to follow some whim. But as she has come
to know me, she has learned that I have even more ideas than she has shoes.
She knows that I will talk about an idea today and forget about it tomorrow.
So, today, she smiles knowingly whenever I announce a crazy idea and only begins
to worry when I continue to talk about an idea for an extended period of time.
Nevertheless, she reminds me from time to time, that my ideas can easily become
a distraction from getting anything productive done.
She is right of course (but for goodness sakes, don’t tell her I said
that!). Moreover, the same thing is true for companies. If they measure innovation
by the number of ideas generated and focus too much on generating lots of ideas,
rather than implementing ideas, they fail to get anything productive done. But,
of course, innovation is not about ideas, it is about being productive with
those ideas. It is about implementing them and generating value.
Real Innovators Demonstrate Innovation
Think about it for a moment. Companies – like Gore, Google, Apple and
others – that we think of as true innovators never brag about how many
ideas they generate in this initiative or that initiative. Rather they demonstrate
innovation. Indeed, take a look at Fast Company’s list of most innovative
companies (http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2011/). Those
on the top ten are recognised for their innovations and not for quantities of
ideas.
What Can You Do?
The solution is simple. If you want to innovate, you need to innovate. This
means your focus should not be on the number of ideas generated, but the value
generated through implemented ideas. A million ideas will do you no good if
you do not implement any of them!
In order to innovate, you need an end to end innovation plan that looks not
only at idea generation, but also on focusing idea generation on strategy, evaluating
ideas efficiently and developing processes to implement the more outlandish
ideas that could be breakthrough innovations. You can learn more about how to
develop an innovation plan in my book The Way of the Innovation Master (see
below).
Instead of simply trying to wring as many ideas as you can out of each employee,
allow employees time to develop ideas. Companies like Google and 3M are famous
for allowing their employees to use 20% of their time to work on personal projects.
Many great ideas have come from this personal time. Indeed, Google’s founders
have recently “tracked the progress of ideas that they had backed versus
ideas that had been executed in the ranks without support from above, and discovered
a higher success rate in the latter category.”(1)
Moreover, think about what you would like employees to be doing during that
20% of their time: generating as many ideas as they can or developing a small
number of ideas into experimental projects.
Likewise, your company should not be focusing on generating as many ideas as
possible. Rather it should be focusing on developing a small number of interesting
ideas into trial projects.
References
1) Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire (October 2008) “Creativity and the
Role of the Leader”, Harvard Business Review, http://hbr.org/2008/10/creativity-and-the-role-of-the-leader/ar/1
© 2011 jpb.com
|
