A sobering truth about creativity and innovation is that even a fabulous idea isn’t good enough. It also has to get attention. It has to win the acceptance of other people, including bosses and clients. And, unfortunately, the graveyard is full of great ideas nobody ever heard of, because they didn’t make it that far. They weren’t launched successfully.
Here are some proven methods of getting your great idea off and running, along with some cautions. I’ve studied these approaches together with my longtime friend and collaborator, Bill Fischer of the IMD in Switzerland. Bill commented on some of these issues, brilliantly, in his Forbes blog last week.
Latch on to a brand
For your purposes, a good brand association may be with a person or a group rather than a product. Identify the people in your organization who have a proven record of success in moving ideas to market, and link your proposal to them in one way or another. Or perhaps, in another time-honored approach, unite your idea with the mission and cherished values of your organization.
Pause for a moment
Before even trying to associate your idea with a well-regarded team at work, give some final thought to whether you want the idea associated with a particularly significant person: You. The moment of launching may be the final chance to consider some important questions before reaching the point of no return. Such as:
Do I want to be known as the person who brought this idea to life? Can I imagine a set of circumstances in which I would not want to be associated with this idea?
Make it compatible
You might have a revolutionary idea, but it still has to be implemented in the existing world. Someone will say, “Yeah, but how does it fit with the way we do business around here?” It’s a fair question. As Bill Fischer often cautions, an idea that requires too much change in an organization may not gain acceptance. Compatibility is a real consideration. You could only pull off one revolution at a time.
Press the hot buttons
What keeps senior managers up at night? What are the problems and opportunities that haunt them during the day? What are their fondest dreams and worst nightmares? If you can tie your idea to any of these hot buttons, you’ll have a much better chance of winning acceptance.
Sell the improvement
Sociologist Randall Collins has researched ways of capturing what he calls a share of “attention space.” One strategy is to frame your idea as extending and improving an existing idea. In other words, identify an idea that someone else is working on, agree with it, and add something that expands and improves it.
That was the approach Steve Jobs took in January 2010 when he introduced the iPad as an improved e-book reader. “Amazon has done a great job” with the Kindle, Jobs declared at a news conference. “We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit further.” This is the principle of improv-ability, which holds that a product can always be better or adapted for additional uses. (The pitch is altogether different from another strategy for gaining attention space— taking a contradictory position, in which you try to demonstrate that a particular idea is completely new, a break with the past.)
Let them try it out
Whenever possible, let people try your idea before they buy into it. As the late communication scholar Everett Rogers demonstrated in his widely influential research, customers and colleagues are far more likely to sign on if they’re less worried about making a decision they’ll come to regret. That’s why iTunes was set up so that people can listen to thirty-second snippets of music before they buy a CD. The tracks are try-able. (Fischer refers to this as “trialability,” or how to “reduce risk through trials.”)
The principle could apply to almost any idea ready for launch. Someone working in a sales department might have a new format for sales reporting that she would like to promote, for example. Instead of simply arguing for the approach, she could start circulating brief versions of reports in the new format, letting people try it out. They might like it and ask for more.
Stay out of the weeds
At all times, you need to keep the message simple. This can be challenging for people who are close to an idea and deeply knowledgeable of its ins and outs. Often they’ll complicate their message unnecessarily by spending most of the time describing how the idea works. It’s much better to instead focus on what stakeholders will get from the idea.
Apple’s experience with the iPad is once again illustrative. Undoubtedly the device has many fascinating technical components, but at the news conference Jobs did not spend much time on them. Instead, he enumerated the benefits of the device: browsing the Web, sending e-mail, sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying music, playing games, and reading e-books. He focused on the users’ experience, what they would get from the idea. That’s what any target audience will want to know.
Notice what happens once you’ve settled on an idea: You need more ideas to launch it. If you’re Steve Jobs in 2010, getting ready to pitch the iPad, you need additional ideas—like how you’re extending Amazon’s work with the Kindle.
You don’t stop thinking once you have a fully developed idea. The search for ideas continues.
Andy Boynton is Dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and coauthor, with Bill Fischer, of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen (Jossey-Bass). William Bole is a journalist and coauthor, with Bob Abernethy, of The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World (PBS/Seven Stories).
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