The January 2006 issue of the magazine TheMarker features innovation as a special topic. One of the articles in the issue was a roundtable discussion with six innovation managers. One of the questions, which they were asked to answer, is: What is the biggest enemy of innovation?
They gave the conventional answers – flood of innovations, failure to integrate with other business functions, failure to share intra-organizational knowledge, insufficient management support, clinging to status quo, culture of punishment for making mistakes, etc.
No one of them gave the following answer:
The biggest enemy of innovation is the tsunami of bad ideas.
Every manager or venture capitalist, who opens up to new ideas, is familiar with the deluge of crackpots with hare-brained ideas, good ideas which currently have fatal flaws, nags, single-minded evangelists of a single idea – but a mediocre idea, etc.
Some ideas require a lot of effort to evaluate them and finally reject them, only to be confronted again with them, brought by another crackpot, who is repeating history. Others get implemented and when they fail, they cause a loss, burnout and depletion of the funds available for new ideas. And the worst – all those nags. Yuk!
Even the most open-minded manager or VC eventually gets burned out after having been subjected to the first 100 nags with 200 mediocre ideas. On the other hand, people, whose ideas have been rejected several times, are not encouraged to bring more ideas. The next idea, which may turn out to be The Next Big Thing, suffers from the previous bad ideas.
At the risk of bringing upon myself a deluge of crackpot ideas, I am asking for ideas how to avoid the dilemma of not missing a good idea on one hand, and avoiding time, attention, discouragement and expenses associated with rejection of thousands of bad ideas on the other hand.
