Google ‘ideas are the only real currency’. You’ll find The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) says it’s so, among many others. And you can even buy a book: “Ideas are your only true currency”.
Let’s just challenge that a bit.
Steve Rigby is joint-CEO of Europe’s biggest private tech firm, the £3.6 billion Rigby Group, and was interviewed in Business Insider magazine. A big investor in start-ups, he believes funding is out there but that a “bigger issue lies with businesses not having products that are market fit, with ideas that are properly thought through…”
Regarding the newly elected UK administration, he said it “needs to be a government of substance, not just a government of ideas.”
So Rigby certainly sees a big gap between the value of an interesting notion and the real currency of a rationalised concept and go-to-market plan.
At CATALYST, my partners and I we do most of our best work in rooms, energising and sparking off people. Frequently this involves developing new ideas to a brief. Whilst, Spring Thinking has delivered the same work, for clients from Hyundai and Harvester to the Highcross shopping centre in Leicester.
My conclusion?
Ideas are cheap.
What counts is the combination of an excellent idea and the process and willingness to realise it. That last bit, the hard yards, is what’s often missing.
It isn’t that ‘brainstorm’ sessions produce no ideas. In my experience they tend to produce ideas in three categories:
Category 1 Ideas are straightforward, unchallenging and easy for all to grasp. They are clearly practical and it’s clear how they would work. They may even be ‘adapted’ from other markets or competitor brands.
Category 2 Ideas are wacky, clearly impractical and arise from the insistence that “this is a blue sky session”. Why not get David Beckham to sponsor our products, for free? What if we created our own new art form to sponsor?
Category 3 Ideas are unusual, or complex, or hard to grasp in the atmosphere of the busy meeting. Or, all three. At best, the person suggesting them finds an ally who gets the idea and gets excited… but everyone else moves on.
So what happens after the session?
Category 1 are the ideas that will eventually progress from your brainstorm session. Sadly, it’s far from guaranteed they’ll have any massive effect on your business. That’s for exactly the same reasons that you picked them… many of them are nothing new and don’t necessarily belong to your brand very strongly.
Category 2 are never heard of again. They represented a bit of fun for your colleagues on the day and you may feel there’s nothing wrong with that.
Category 3 are also never heard of again. That’s a massive shame because these are often the most interesting, the most able to support a unique strategy for your business.
They fail because most brainstorm sessions are not structured well enough for them to be developed during the meeting. And, you have no structured thinking process in place for them to be “picked up” after the meeting and better explored.
Here’s what you need to get better results.
Organisational work, firstly – pick a team that can pull together and hit deadlines for developing your idea to be market ready.
Working out what your milestones are in advance and allocating resource is the difference between success and failure. Structured thinking guru Edward de Bono calls this wearing your ‘blue hat’. Not glamorous, but essential.
Your team will also need a lot of enthusiasm and positive framing. They need to think this new idea, this project, is brilliant. They must be actively encouraged in this. That’s the only attitude that will batter through the obstacles in pursuit of making the idea work.
On the opposite side of the coin, a healthy idea must be open to constructive criticism. De Bono recommends that we actively look for reasons why our lovely idea will fail. Fall, in fact, on its arse.
This “black hat” attitude lands badly with some, especially Amiable personality, people. It feels negative and it is. But recognising and fixing potential issues before they can derail your new product or service is vital.
(It feels like this is one of the things Steve Rigby would suggest seed-stage businesses don’t do.)
Apply these modes of thinking and management and your Category 3 ideas could just turn into the new eBay, for you. By eBay I mean, something genuinely new, that probably sounds like it won’t work … until it does.
Ultimately, then, are ideas really the true currency? Looks to me like they are a currency, but you need help to take them to the bank.
So here’s a good idea. Why not talk to me about this, soon?
