Crucial First Step of Innovation

Most innovation fails to survive infancy because people engage in innovation doing before they successfully engage innovation thinking. Well before the learning phase of innovation, each participant should complete an idea “core dump” of everything they know or believe about the subject at hand. Whether completed on a roll of brown butcher paper, laptop, napkin, or whiteboard, every possible idea should be spewed onto the chosen media, and the core dump should not stop until the innovator has posited every idea they have.

Won’t some of these ideas be unscientific, opinion, hearsay, or irrelevant? If the innovator has truly exhaled all ideas related to the subject of study, many of the ideas will fit into these categories. Why, then, should we spend valuable time on this counter-intuitive exercise? Because somewhere in this pile of intellectual debris are clues that are important to development of the innovation. Strategist Gary Hamel said, “In an increasingly nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas are likely to create new wealth,” and the innovation core-dump is often ripe with nonlinear ideas. Warren Bennis similarly noted, “Great Groups are not realistic places. They are exuberant, irrationally optimistic ones.” Canadian design icon Bruce Mau utilizes the core-dump process in his creative work: “Mau developed a working model that encouraged the designers in his studio to speculate first, and research later. The point was to come up with wild ideas, scenarios, possible solutions; then to sketch them, film them, express them in the form of collage pictures cut out of magazines, tape them to the wall…Mau came to believe that in those earliest stages of thinking about a problem, when people were unencumbered by data and expert opinion and conventional wisdom, they were most likely to happen upon and be open to fresh, unusual, and possibly game-changing ideas.”

Before you begin any creative or innovative endeavor, complete an idea core-dump. Innovation thinking always precedes successful innovation doing.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, ideas, invention, innovation process, ideation, productivity


References

Bennis, W., & Biederman, P. (1997). Organizing genius. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

Berger, W. (2009). Glimmer: how design can transform your life, and maybe even the world. New York: The Penguin Press.

Hamel, G. (2002). Leading the revolution. New York: Plume, 2002.

Persistence

Because of continual media hype, we live in an era of “instapreneurs.” We are led to believe that possessing a good idea allows one to easily build and flip a company in months (if not days). Successful innovation rarely works that way, and is more aligned with the quip, “He was an overnight success in ten years.” As author Scott Berkun noted, “The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem…Often, hard work extends for years. It took Carlson, the inventor of the photocopier, decades of concentrated effort before Xerox released its first copying machine.” Leadership authority Warren Bennis similarly considered the protracted focus and effort required for innovation success: “Great groups are full of indefatigable people who are struggling to turn a vision into a machine and whose lawns and goldfish have died of neglect…They are so taken with the beauty and difficulty of the task that they don’t want to talk about anything else, be anywhere else, do anything else.” Stanford Professor Robert Sutton said that recognizing the ability to buckle down and work a problem into the ground may be helpful as corporations decide which innovation projects to back: “If you can’t decide which new projects or ideas to bet on based on their objective merits, pick those that will be developed by the most committed and persuasive heretics you can find.” One recalls the young computer software coders in Douglas Coupland’s book entitled Microserfs, generously sliding flat foods (pizza, Pop-Tarts, etc.) under the door of their colleague holed up in his office for days at a time. What are you so dedicated to accomplishing?

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, failure, ideas, invention, persistence, productivity


References

Coupland, D. (2004). Microserfs. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

Bennis, W., & Biederman, P. (1997). Organizing genius. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Sutton, R. (2002). Weird ideas that work. New York, NY: Free Press.