When Did You Have Your Last New Idea – And What Impact Has It Made on Your Business?

I am reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and at the same time reflecting on the extent to which I see, or more accurately don’t see, idea generation as a natural part of most organizations culture. Sadly, it is far from the norm.

Sure ideas get generated, but mostly they are met with a litany of reasons and explanations that pretty much guarantee that ideas will go nowhere. We’ve all heard the idea killers:

• We’ve tried that, it doesn’t work
• That’s a good idea but it won’t work here
• We don’t have the budget, the time… to be distracted with that
• We have enough on our plate at the moment, can we table that for the moment
• Good idea, make sure it gets in the minutes – code for that going nowhere, but thanks for sharing
• I’ll run it by… and see what the reaction is
• You add your favorite idea killers…

Most executives spend too large a portion of their time managing their core business – their production engine – the source of their place in the market and their profitability – not to mention their bonuses and their pathway to promotion, or even their job security.

In most organizations too much time is spent maintaining the status quo and not enough time is spent generating new ideas that will transform the business and industry. We all know the examples of business after business that lost out defending their traditional paradigm only to see an Apple or an Amazon or a Google completely change the game.

Part of the reason that companies like Apple, Google, for example, get so much press is that that are superb at idea generation and turning those ideas into new business and they are several standard deviations from the norm. Johnson tells of the launch of Google News, which went from an idea that was generated by Krishna Bharat in his 20% time to shipped product in one year.

Ideas are not scarce that is the irony – what is scarce in far too many companies is a culture in which ideas can thrive:

• Where being a maverick and thinking differently is valued
• Where experiments are encouraged
• Where failed experiments are valued for the insights they produce
• Where there are open doors, open networks and open minds
• Where collaboration and exploration is an all the time way of interaction
• Where boundaries are porous – inside the organization and outside.

It is disquieting to see in Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 2010 listing of the 50 Most Innovative Companies that the majority of the top 25 companies come from outside the United States.

My bottom line, from years of working with organizations: to get a transformation so that idea generation is the norm, the culture of the organization has to be reinvented.

The culture of most organizations is not designed for new ideas, especially ones that could create a new future for the organizations. And most executives have been trained, I’d even say indoctrinated, to reject ideas that do not fit with their existing paradigm:

• Do I agree with this idea – code does it fit my existing paradigm?
• Do I like it – code will it impact my bonus, career, job even?
• Am I certain it will work – code does it fit my existing paradigm?
• Will others buy in – code does it fit their paradigm?

The paradox, innovative ideas by definition do not fit the prevailing paradigm – if they do fit they are just more, maybe better, and maybe different than the past – but still the status quo.