Summary
While companies try to create out-of-the box ideas, they often use in-the-box evaluation methods. The first common problem is using the area experts to evaluate ideas without the benefit of new eyes The second is voting or reaching consensus to choose ideas. This guarantees that no truly creative or disruptive ideas will be chosen. Ideas should be sponsored rather than chosen. This is the first step to guarantee execution.
Innovation: Evaluation
Fresh, new ideas seen by tired, old eyes just seem tired and old
Lose the experts
There's a well-known story about Richard Feynman, a famous
and brilliant physicist (the guy who found the o-ring problem
with the Challenger shuttle). When he arrived at CalTech,
his faculty advisor wouldn't let him take any physics classes
because he didn't want to ruin Richard's mind. At MIT, my
professors often talked about the best research being conducted
by scientists in their twenties and early thirties,
not because younger is smarter, but because they don't know
any better. Game-changing ideas challenge the orthodoxy
of the way things are and people steeped in that orthodoxy
are more likely to believe in its veracity and less likely
to challenge it. You can only achieve the impossible if
you don't know that its impossible.
Let's return to our innovation teams. Here it is, stocked
with the usual suspects - all the experts in that area.
Whenever they encounter an idea that challenges the orthodoxy
of their field, they shake their heads at the naiveté of
the originator. Obviously, he or she knows nothing about
how things are done. It may seem like a good idea to outsiders,
but that's simply not how their area works. Unfortunately,
membership on these teams is often a political process and
the current top managers or future leaders, who are already
part of managing the business, end up on these teams. How
can you take the same people who are responsible for implementing
new ideas as part of their normal jobs, rebrand them
as an innovation team and expect a result different from
what they've already been doing?
The people evaluating the ideas must be those who are not
experts in the field. You can have experts on the team,
but they should be in the minority, not the majority. You
can' t get out-of-the-box thinking from people already deeply
in the box. This is why your teams should also include your
most junior members and the people whose thinking is most
different from the current management team.
Consensus breeds mediocrity
You've all heard the tales of great innovators being scoffed
at for their crazy ideas. Yet, despite the disdain from
the general public or the established community, the great
innovator persisted, perhaps with some encouragement from
one or two supporters until he or she showed the naysayers
how wrong they were. This is the classic tale of innovation.
Yet, in business, how do we evaluate ideas? By consensus,
of course. The most votes wins!
This method guarantees that the lowest common denominator
ideas will pass through to the next step. Any really ground-breaking
idea will be controversial, and these controversial ideas
will be weeded out through the voting process. When I led
an innovation team, we didn't vote on ideas. We discussed
and eliminated some, but ideas were progressed by assigning
sponsors. The sponsor(s) was responsible for fleshing the
concept out and taking it to the next step. If you were
really passionate about something, you became its sponsor.
If an idea didn't spark that crazy passion and couldn't
find a sponsor, it was abandoned. We took an amazing
number of ideas to fruition! And people got
to work on things they were passionate about! What more
could you ask for?
Assigning sponsors to nurture ideas is a much better way
to ensure that all the crazy and controversial ideas don't
get weeded out by driving to consensus. Consensus will only
get you mediocrity, and you probably already have enough
of that.