Ideas are not Cheap
Ideas are not cheap. Every wrong idea sucks up resources and time, reducing opportunities to turn the right ideas into winning new products.
More current data from one global consumer goods company suggests it takes 300 new ideas turned into 40 R&D projects to deliver 1 successful new product.
However, the data from this particular company also reports that half of their fully developed products fail in the final research stage. Was it because there was something wrong with the product? No, the idea was wrong in the first place.
It’s crazy to assume that the more ideas you shove into the front-end of the innovation process the more chance a successful product will pop out the back. Instead, the opposite effect usually occurs.
The more poorly conceived ideas you put into the front-end, the more clogged up the feasibility and development stages become, producing fewer quality results.
On the other hand, if you start off by working with a few good ideas you reduce the resources spent on weeding out the wrong ones. The more right ideas you put in, the more successful products come out. The quality of the ideas going into the innovation process will have more impact on the output than anything else.
Start with the wrong ideas and you will fail. Start with too many ideas - because you can’t figure out which are the good ones - and you simply reduce the resources you have to spend on the right ideas.
A great introduction to this unique new problem-led front-end of innovation technique. The book is also a complete DIY guide to running your own KN3W IDEAS workshop because it contains a complete set of the patent-pending KN3W IDEAS templates and tools, and a step-by-step classroom in a book tutorial – everything you need to start picking the right things to do – now!
