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This rush to action means that your initial idea may not fulfil its full 1 : THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING STRONG IDEAS
potential.

Additional and alternative ideas which the very process of validating
your idea and searching for new solutions would have produced are lost.
3M’s ubiquitous Post-it® notes were born in part from research into very
strong glues, for example, rather than the weak glue which characterises
the product familiar to us all today. You should always remember the
dictum attributed to Tudor Rickards, Professor of Creativity and
Organisational Change at the Manchester Business School: ‘A good idea
is the enemy of a better one. You stop looking for alternatives.’

a good idea is the enemy of a better
one. You stop looking for alternatives

solving the wrong problem More damagingly, your initial idea

may be solving the wrong problem. Min Basadur reports how this
happened at Procter & Gamble in connection with an automatic car-
wash product.6 A leading competitor had recently launched a hot wax
product which was both patent-protected and apparently selling
extremely strongly. The research group was tasked to develop a
competing product without infringing the patent. The patent involved
combining wax from the South American carnauba tree with certain
stabilisers and water to produce a stable fluid capable of being sprayed
on cars and so overcoming the problem that wax does not dissolve in
water.

After 18 months of apparently fruitless labour, the Procter & Gamble
team had become bogged down in solving the problem of how to
develop a carnauba wax formula without violating the existing patent.
Basadur showed the power of asking direct simple questions such as
‘Why?’ and ‘How?’. The response to his question ‘how well does the
competing product perform?’ was very limited. Colleagues believed that
it was selling well and that it therefore was performing well. No
empirical data existed to support this view. Rigorous testing soon
established that the competitor’s product did not adhere effectively to
cars. In other words, the Procter & Gamble team had been trying to
duplicate a product which did not work. Basadur rapidly redefined the