p.59 when an idea is truly revolutionary - or disruptive (a revolutionary idea which disrupts
an entire industry and forces all players to change how they do business. Think of: Amazon for book sales, Dell for PC sales
and Skype for Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony), it may not be adaptable to your traditional pre-implementation methods.
p.101 The first thing to do with any problem is to ask "Why is this a problem?" five times
[JLJ - Baumgartner has us then ask "Why else?" after we reply with our first answer] ...We now need to try and understand
why the problem has occurred. So, we ask the question, "Why has this occurred?" five times.
p.112 Brainstorming is most effective with diverse groups of 8-12 people and should be performed in a relaxed
environment.
p.127 There tends to be a correlation between how audacious and risky an idea is and its innovativeness.
p.129 A combination of occasional radical innovation and regular incremental innovation is the best balance...
many companies have an overly strict idea review process that requires every idea pass a number of hurdles and committees
before it is implemented. Very often these companies attempt to reduce the risk of the idea.
p.130 The next time you need to generate ideas, push for audacity... When generating ideas solo,
be audacious. The more the better.
p.139 Ideas with the greatest potential may initially seem absurd or non-viable. They may
even scare your colleagues... The Innovation Master realises that highly creative ideas are risky and may not work out.
p.158 One of the most pervasively flawed concepts in organisational innovation is that voting for ideas
is a good idea. The Innovation Master knows that the opposite is true. Voting is a completely ineffective method of
identifying potentially innovative ideas. Worse, it tends to hide the most innovative ideas and so can actually work
against your innovation process.
p.162 we can see that voting for ideas in suggestion scheme software encourages
people to vote for ideas that achieve early popularity, usually for no better reason than that they were the first
submitted ideas. Moreover, new visitors are likely to view only those ideas with the most votes, thereby
being less likely to see, let alone vote on, more recently submitted ideas that are actually more creative
p.164 Sadly, the more creative an idea is, the harder it is to convince managers to give you the okay to
implement it.
p.164-165-166 If you can hand an item to someone, it is much easier to sell the person on the benefits of
that item than it is if you simply describe the item. For this reason, the best way to sell an idea is to make a prototype
of it... If your idea is for a new service that your firm could offer... You simply need to apply your creativity
to the problem of how to prototype a service... Making a prototype of an operational idea is the most difficult of
all... I have had success in drawing cartoons to show processes... Alternatively, it can sometimes be effective
to make a prototype of a bad process in order to demonstrate the importance of replacing the process with
a better one.
p.169 The important thing to bear in mind when experimenting is to push ideas as far as you can.
If the idea seems to work in experimentation, don't stop. Push the idea further... don't be afraid to try out radical
ideas based on hunches. After all, that is where the best ideas often originate.
p.172 There are a number of reasons why creative ideas fail to become innovations... More often, the problem
is that organisations invest in creative ideation initiatives... but fail to invest in implementing the most creative
ideas that come from those initiatives... There are many reasons why creative idea are killed and
almost all of them have to do with risk. Implementing a new idea is perceived as risky and people in the company do not wish
to undertake that risk. So, the idea is killed.
