#ideas16

IOpening Keynote, ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference

Andrew C. Boynton

Sunday, March 13

The Broadmoor

Colorado Springs, CO

Too often, people fall into the trap of thinking that the only worthwhile idea is a thoroughly original one. Idea Hunters know better. They understand that valuable ideas are already out there, waiting to be found — and not just in the usual places. Enter Andy Boynton — dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, regular feature on Forbes.com, and groundbreaking author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen. This myth-busting keynote reveals that great business ideas do not spring from innate creativity, or necessarily from the brilliant minds of people. Rather, great ideas come to those who are in the habit of looking for great ideas — all around them, all the time.

Andrew C. Boynton (@Andy_Boynton) makes a strong case that innovation is curation more than orginality. He starts by suggesting that good idea hunting begins with establishing your vision and focus and then tuning into to ideas which, like radio waves, surround us continually.

One of the original idea hunters was Thomas Edison, who created the capability to find ideas and constantly innovated to create value, adding a new invention approximately every six months! Unlike his predecessors who built incremental improvements, Thomas Edison would establish a vision and “backcast” from that to the necessary incremental tactics, big and small, which he would then address in order.

One of the first components of idea hunting and innovation for Thomas Edison was to find “smart creatives” (those who scored 90% or more on his 100-question test that covered history, philosophy as well as the technology of the day). He also reviewed failures, which he viewed as some of his greatest assets, as the ideas and experiences behind them could often be re-purposed. Setting up an infrastructure for cultivating ideas on is particular important today when one considers that products and services typically time out after a limited shelf-life of, perhaps, 3-4 years.

Another famous idea-hunter was Walt Disney, who borrowed his idea for Disneyland from his trip to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. Some of your best ideas will come from other industries, so spending time with people from different backgrounds is important. And, like Thomas Edison, Walt Disney mined “failures,” occasionally even looking through wastebaskets to recycle the discarded ideas of his cartoonists.

Andy Boynton also cites a current innovator, Apple CMO Phil Schiller who helped develop the iPod by borrowing 1983′s HP9000′s "clickwheel.” To recycle such disparate ideas, leave your comfort zone by going on trips, socializing with “weird people,” reading and embracing failure. (Even Jeff Bezos estimates Amazon gets it right about 30% of the time.)

Through Ideo (@ideo), Andy Boynton is also co-creator of DeepDive™, “the world’s leading methodology for helping executives harness the power of teams to significantly improve problem-solving speed, innovation and results.” His  DeepDive process: form an eclectic team that interviews experts, immerses themselves in a problem, encourages collaboration and even wild ideas and resists focusing on seniority or ruling out any ideas prematurely.

He sites 7 key factors to leverage your team’s passion and brainpower to generate great ideas and achieve a vision:

Time pressure

Clear goals and realistic commitments

Diverse skills

Idea hunting

Rapid prototyping

Great conversations

Taking the initiative once an opportunity is identified

More money, more resources, more time never equal more ideas: hire smart people, harness their expertise and skills to drive innovation. And, instead of providing time, assign deadlines. Rapid prototyping on a fixed time frame is vital. People, and their collective IQ, are the guts of innovation. Energize your people and leverage their power, he says. Establish clear goals and realistic constraints to focus brainpower before unleashing the ideas. Remember, too, that conversations move ideas and to “fail often in order to succeed sooner!”

His parting advice is that innovation is about finding practical solutions (functional, emotional and social) aimed at your vision and then backcasting from those. Great idea hunters purposefully increase the probability of colliding with a great idea every day!