Ideas have been getting a bad rap lately.
Some say the lack of innovation within organizations isn’t because of a lack of ideas, rather a lack of action. There are too many ideas and not enough implementors.
But, ideas need champions to implement them. Just the same way seeds need farmers.
A popular recommendation is: Stop generating ideas and start taking action. Stop the brainstorming and get to work. To maintain the farm comparison, since crop production (innovation) is down we need more farmers (execution) and fewer seeds (ideas).
But that doesn’t work. We’d end up with a bunch of hungry farmers standing in cropless fields.
Fact is, we need both.
There is a symbiotic relationship between these pairs. One can’t get along without the other. We ‘get’ that a seed isn’t a plant. We should understand an idea isn’t a plan. Seed (and ideas) take time, patience, pruning, and weeding to bear fruit.
And brainstorming is for more than idea generation. It is also a solution-finding process. We meet for more than creating ideas. Brainstorming and strategy sessions help us choose the right idea to properly solve the problem or grow the business. Which seed is right for the soil you have? For the amount of water you have access to? What is right for the crop you want to produce?
Next time you run into someone bashing ideas, remember… It isn’t one or the other. We need to be good at both idea generation and idea execution.
Tags: business_growth, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
In a larger organization I think the seed gets passed around to various farmers and each must put their “stamp” on it until it looks more like a deflated football than a seed. And each farmer it touches doesn’t want to take the risk of planting the seed in case it doesn’t grow. In a truly innovative large company they plant lots of seeds and many of them do not produce fruit, but some become award winning recipes.
In a smaller company the problem is generally that their is no soil in which to plant the seed or no water to nurture them. It only takes a small group of farmers to generate a record crop, but it cannot be done without water and soil.
How’s that for totally overdoing an analogy
There are a few additional points.
Organizations need to have a soft processes in place to evaluate and identify ideas which could translate into innovation. There also needs to be a process for those ideas which were at first not identified as interesting in order to avoid losing them as we know that serendipity plays a key role in innovation.
And finally for the identified idea it requires a budget estimation and an allocation of the right resources to make it happen, a calendar (which can be reviewed) as well as a nominated executive who will sponsor the champion and his team.
How true. And market research can also play a role in helping to determine which seeds can germinate more than others.
While Anne-Caroline’s point is valid, I caution on putting too much oversight in the beginning. Any farmer worth his salt will tell you to “overseed” to insure a bumper crop. Let the seeds germinate and grow until you see how the crop is filling in. Then, you put the oversight in to “thin” and “weed” the crop to eliminate the bad ideas, and too many ideas for the resources you have to allocate to them. So to sum up, encourage the seeds and manage the growth.