How Many Ideas Do You Need?
/Fifteen. Or sixty-four. Heck, the more the merrier—as long as enough good ones make it to reality.
There is, of course, no right answer to this question. Too few ideas and you stagnate—keep trying the same old things until they work. Then again, you can only act on so many ideas at a time if you’re to do justice to the pick of the crop.
One simple way to know where you stand is to manage the idea process as a funnel and determine how big a funnel you can afford (how much time your business can invest in new ideas). Then you simply have to keep that funnel full.
You can always grow the funnel if resources become available—or shrink it when belts are tightened.
Once your funnel is full, you just keep it active. New ideas, regular curation, and candid testing.
(If you like numbers, I suggest you spend 10 percent of your innovation time on idea creation and 90 percent on curation and testing of the leading candidates.)
It doesn’t take any fancy system to manage this model. Your notebook is a start, and a shared spreadsheet with timelines will do find for the ideas that are with the team. I bet you could start that process in 20 minutes.
If you want to go deeper, Trusting Technology, delves into generating insight, innovation portfolios, and find inspiration in the Parables of Tech.
In the final episode of this series, we’ll look at building a better ideas factory. Before then, this exercise will help you get started…
Your next step to the big idea
Scan down this list and check the things you ARE doing. Then decide how you can best fill the gaps:
Do you keep a log of ideas—ways to solve problems AND to exploit opportunities?
Do you curate these ideas effectively—deciding whether to invest or shelve?
Do you have a roadmap for testing each leading candidate?
Do you track the progress of each tested candidate through its life cycle? (Recall Idea—Innovation—Experiment—Adoption—Differentiator—Commodity—Redundancy.)
Trusting Technology is a book about forming ideas, exploring opportunities with customers and colleagues, and building your future together. Order your copy here.