Recently I took a journey through 50+ years of innovations that I’ve worked on. From this, I’ve come to the conclusion that to invent REALLY BIG IDEAS – you MUST separate idea generation from reality.
When REALLY BIG IDEAS
were created they were almost always done separately from the work of deep clarification, refinement, or even optimization of the ideas. A month of preparation “filling the mind” – a Day of Intense INSPIRATION – then a few days of optimization and about a month of intense cycles of learning and pivoting.
The REALLY BIG IDEAS were created with a touch of fantasy and in many cases lunacy. THEN – they went through a disciplined process to adapt and pivot them so as to make them viable, profitable, and successful. Importantly – the process used was such that the “spirit” of the idea didn’t get killed. In fact – in the most successful cases the process actually made the really big ideas MUCH BIGGER!
FULL DISCLOSURE – To create this way you must be comfortable with IDEA WASTE and UNCERTAINTY. Thousands will be created – most will die and you will feel uncertainty for some time.
Having traveled this journey many times – I will say it’s well worth the effort.