Where Good Ideas Come From

October 26, 2012

Interview with David Minter, co- author of the book Lightning in a Bottle

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Mike Carruthers:
To generate new ideas, organizations like to brainstorm - that is get a group of people together to throw out any and all ideas...

David Minter:
Terrible - it's an absolute recipe for disaster.
 

David Minter, co-author of the book Lightning in a Bottle, says that kind of brainstorming is based on a false assumption that there are no bad ideas.

The problem is that there are a lot of bad ideas, in fact if you look at the numbers and the failure rates, most ideas are bad. So, if you're going to use brainstorming, what you need to do is you need to feed the hopper with information first; and all that means is give people a foundation for what is a problem you're trying to solve or what is a new product or service, what's been done in the past that worked or didn't work and why didn't it work.

When you frame a brainstorming session that way, David says you're much more likely to generate good ideas. Nine out of ten new businesses, products and services fail and David says the reason organizations have such a dismal failure rate is they give the job of developing new ideas to the wrong people.

It's a terribly difficult and dangerous job and for reasons that still are mystifying, it's often given to junior people that really don't have any specialized training and really are just kind of grasping at straws and it's a very, very common thing that we see where the newest guy in the marketing job gets the hardest job.