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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS112

ground rule 2: quantity breeds quality This principle

develops naturally from the preceding one. The more you defer
judgement, the more ideas you are likely to generate. The more ideas
you generate, the greater the likelihood that some of the ideas you
develop will be of good quality. Experience suggests that on average,
out of every 60 ideas only one will be a true winner. So always try to
generate as many ideas as possible to increase your chances of
developing good ideas.

You should also try to build on as many ideas as you can, creating
associations and developing links wherever you can.

Alex Osborn tells the story of a brainstorming session undertaken with
helicopter pilots in order to address the problem of rapidly unfreezing
700 miles of outside telephone cables which were so coated in frost that
long-distance calls could not be made. The idea which was selected for
implementation, and which you might have thought would have been
the most ‘natural’ for the pilots to identify, presented itself only as idea
number 36. The solution involved flying helicopters over the telephone
cables so that the blades’ downdraft dissipated the frost.86

ground rule 3: the wilder the idea, the better You must

be prepared to take a certain amount of risk in what you propose if you
want to be truly productive. If you start with ‘safe’ ideas based on
cautious rationality, you are unlikely to achieve real breakthrough
ideas.

The discipline of business process re-engineering provides many
examples of this. The cautious approach would be limited to asking
how to make a given process 10 per cent more efficient, whereas the
breakthrough ideas which are the essence of business process
re-engineering result from the question: how could we eliminate the
process completely?

Although a wild idea cannot always be implemented exactly as
proposed, a subsequent modification to one of these so-called
‘intermediate impossible’ solutions frequently can be. So a particular
value of wild ideas lies in their ability to provoke, and to act as
stepping stones to, highly innovative and workable follow-up ideas.

A brainstorming session at a chemical company produced a startling
question from an engineer: ‘Why don’t we put gunpowder in our house