Your Ideas don't Matter as Much as you Think they Do.

By Becky Downing

When I graduated from university at the tender age of 22, I had a burning desire to pursue a life-long dream of starting a business…

With my newly minted degree in business (admittedly with a major in partying!), I was all set to go. What could possibly go wrong?Well, as I have since learned, there’s a lot that could go wrong. I also learned that a business degree (or MBA for that matter) would not prepare me for the trials and tribulations I was to encounter (and IMHO, you do not need these to be a successful entrepreneur).  But none of this ended up mattering, because I didn’t have the courage to start my entrepreneurial journey until I reached my thirties. What stopped me from pursuing my dream in my twenties?

I didn’t have the ‘Big Idea’…. The game-changing, disruptive concept…the genius [fill in the gap] solution on another level of steroids.

However, I ended up learning the hard way, like so many others, that the idea accounts for less than 1% of success.

I have seen this phenomenon repeat itself time and again, not only with entrepreneurs trying to make it in the wild, but in corporations valiantly striving to innovate. So much time and money is invested into ‘ideation’ and the pursuit of the winning idea. 

Here’s the thing. Ideas are abundant in companies. Companies are able to hire smart, capable employees (often with MBA’s from top institutions) who do not lack in creativity or ingenuity. The problem that I have encountered time and again is the inability to effectively transform ideas into products and services that appeal to a captive market.

Perhaps ‘inability’ is too harsh a word and it is more accurate to say that most corporate innovators lack the courage (or the full autonomy / mandate) to take nascent ideas to market and quickly to test them. Any lack of courage however is less so the shortcoming of the individual, and more so a consequence of a corporate’s culture and willingness to embrace ‘failure’.

The journey from idea to go-to-market is littered with brainstorms, specifications, crazy bureaucracy and stakeholder management, legacy systems, prohibitive compliance, ongoing never ending product development, endless research reports and customer discovery. Then after all that, the project is often killed before it ever gets to market. The result is disappointed and frustrated employees and little progress towards real innovation.

I don’t know if there’s a genetic marker for entrepreneurship and being a good innovator. But if there is, it’s most likely not a genius for planning and market research. It’s a propensity for action — and the ability to put failure behind you quickly. We need to stop being precious about our ideas.

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of embryonic businesses. To get to the one idea that is worth iterating on, you need to have a lot of ideas — a lot of bad as well as average (and hopefully good) ideas. You then need to test a large enough sample of those ideas quickly and at a very small scale to arrive at the one good one.

We have to stop thinking and start doing.

Now wait a minute. 'Doing' could be interpreted in a million different ways, such as doing more market and ethnographic research, conducting more prospective customer interviews, creating more fictional customer profiles, designing more paper prototypes, fleshing out your business plan even more (and whilst you are at it aiming for a gold star by diligently ensuring that you stay up to date on your mandatory corporate training and partaking in all daily stand-ups, regardless of whether they drive the project forward). If you’re exhausted from just reading that sentence, then welcome to the world of many corporate innovators!

However, I don't mean that kind of doing….

The 'doing' that I am referring to comprises the actions required to get the idea to market quickly and cheaply so that it can be tested with real customers.

We attribute way too much value to getting the idea validated by peers, bosses, execs, shareholders, consultants, comprehensive research, or even prospective customers. Yes, there is some value in stakeholder feedback (these are, after all, usually smart, successful people). But bear in mind that they by no means have all the answers and often suffer from a (very human but also very obstructive) fear of the new and uncertain. There is some value in interviewing potential customers. But the reality is that (a) they may not be representative of what your actual customers will be; and (b) many will tell you what you want to hear, especially if they are being paid (whether with money or pizza!).

Not launching an idea and the endless research and pre-GTM actioning effectively amounts to what I not-so-affectionately call ‘Launchitis’. It’s an affliction that is all too common in the world of corporate innovation (as well as in the wild).

What I truly believe it all comes down to relates to what I alluded to above: A lack of confidence. It’s incredibly human and something I have also suffered from in abundance. Have we done enough market research? Have we interviewed enough customers? What if it ends up being a gigantic flop and it negatively affects our reputation / brand (and by extension, careers)? What if, what if, what if? Often, we are dealing with an entirely new business model and / or concept and so the relevant Mintel report simply does not exist.

The key thing to remember is that all the planning in the world doesn’t matter, because ideas have a way of changing, once they hit the real world. I’ve never seen a business plan survive an encounter with a real customer.

That may all sound a little demotivating, so then what is the answer? Working on the corporate’s culture and providing a safe space to engage in rapid experimentation is crucial. A big part of this is developing a collective mindset that revolves around the very simple but highly effective process of iteration.

I read an intriguing interview with the artist Beth Letain, who, prior to ever putting paint on a canvas, creates dozens of watercolor sketches. Very few of them end up becoming paintings, but that’s kind of the point: They’re part of the process of unearthing a good idea.

“I am trying to find the ones that buzz,” she said.

Get addicted to the thrill of ideation and iteration!