Two weeks ago, we discussed the first five of ten important aspects of ideas, the currency of the 21st century. Today, let’s continue and conclude the article with the final five recommendations on how to deal successfully with ideas.
6. Ideas need both soloists and team players to succeed. An idea always comes out of an individual brain. However, nowadays it typically takes more than an individual creator to turn a great new idea into a breakthrough innovation that will shake the world. Having the original idea is only the beginning of the story; but many brains and hands need to put in a lot of effort and time to develop, enhance, pitch, and activate the original idea to make it an innovation success. While innovation starts with an individual moment of ingenuity, it is followed by many hours of intense collaborative work. In innovation, as in sport, you need both an ingenious individualist and strong, hard-working team players to win the big trophies.
7. Powerful ideas cannot be unthought and stopped. The moment a big idea has been thought, expressed and publicly shared with others, it cannot be unthought again. Once a big idea is out in the public domain and people understand its value, no one will be able permanently to suppress it even with great force or violence. “You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build,” noted the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey in this context. Throughout history, many dictators or reigning institutions have learned the lesson that all their intense efforts to suppress and kill a “dangerous” big idea ultimately failed, whether the idea was “The Earth is not in the center of the universe” or “Democracy.” As the French writer Victor Hugo rightly remarked: “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
8. The bigger the idea, the harsher the response by the establishment. “A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds,” remarked Mark Twain. Every bold, big idea has never been done before, and because of this, the establishment welcomes it with sharp criticism and ridicule. “Every really new idea looks crazy at first,” noted the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, and Nelson Mandela similarly reminds us that “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” So avoid prematurely labeling new ideas as crazy, impossible or total nonsense, and instead approach them with curiosity and an open beginner’s mind. “Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill. Don’t forget that, all of you who don’t have them,” cautions John Elliott Jr., the former chairman of the ad agency Ogilvy and Mather.
9. Have many ideas to have a good one. The American psychologist J. P. Guilford crystallized years of research into individual creativity into the following insight: “The person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.”
What’s true for playing the lottery holds equally true for ideation — statistically, the odds of hitting the jackpot rise with the number of tickets you hold in your hand.
10. Ideas follow a life cycle: Have you ever noticed that just like human beings, ideas have a life cycle? Let’s go through the life phases of an idea. Somebody thinks “Bingo!”, and a new idea is born. In its first moments, the idea needs to be acknowledged (e.g., by writing it down and giving it a name), nurtured and well protected from the attacks of critics by its creator. Once the idea has survived its critical “baby days,” it develops. Over time, more and more people understand and appreciate the great value that the idea adds and fall in love with it. The idea matures further until the point where it reaches the peak of its fame and appreciation. Then, slowly but steadily, the idea starts to decline in importance and appreciation until the day when it finally dies — and a fresh idea takes its place.
Let’s look at an example. Twenty years ago, the Sony Walkman was a fantastic product that stood as a synonym for a whole product category and significantly improved the quality of leisure life of many people. Back to today. Do you see many people walk around with their Sony Walkman these days? The Sony Walkman died a few years ago, and a new, much better product has taken its place. The Sony Walkman of today is Apple’s iPod, which has a market share of roughly 70% of the modern digital music players. Now what are the chances that in 20 years from now, you will still use the iPod? That’s how the life cycle of ideas works in practice — not only for products, but also for industries, lead technologies or scientific models and theories.
What can we learn from this story? First, don’t get overly attached to a great idea — it makes it easier to fall out of love with it again once a better fresh idea arrives. Second, innovation never stops — once you have brought one idea to the stage that it is loved, immediately start working on your next big idea to stay ahead in the innovation game.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2009. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 10 September 2009.