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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS210

More recent inventors to whom contemporary public acknowledgement
and financial reward were largely denied include Sir Frank Whittle,
inventor of the jet engine, and Sir Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the
Hovercraft.

corporate dilettantes The obstacles to implementation which

exist within organisations, let alone in the external world, represent
particular challenges to the would-be innovator.

In a particularly stern Harvard Business Review article entitled
‘Creativity is not enough’, Theodore Levitt condemns as irresponsible
the compulsive idea generators whose distaste for the mundane realities
of organisational life make them incapable of executing real projects.160
Levitt views these throw-it-over-the-wall-my-task-is-now-finished
creative specialists as ineffectual dilettantes with literally nothing to
show. For Levitt, such so-called creatives are not worthy of the name –
they are just talkers, not true creative artists whose work can actually be
measured. After all, innovation is creativity which has been made to
work.

increasing the likelihood of successful
implementation Thorough planning increases the likelihood of

successful implementation. It is much better to have foreseen the
problems and issues at the planning stage, and to have considered
creatively how to overcome them or mitigate their effects, than to
encounter stumbling blocks for the first time during implementation
itself.

In the Internet Securities, Inc. case study in the previous chapter, we
saw how Gary Mueller identified that a potential block to successful
implementation of the company was its relative ease of imitation by
competitors. He also recognised that the strengths of his business idea
included his ease of access to the specialist communities in the Warsaw
stock exchange and in financial journalism.

His elegant solution to the potential implementation block was to
capitalise on his access to financial specialists by maximising the
sources of financial information ‘exclusive’ to Internet Securities, Inc.
The introduction of ‘exclusive’ material created barriers to entry,
making imitation of his business model much more difficult.