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171 : THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING STRONG IDEAS

In addition, real life has a persistent habit of intruding at each and
every step of the innovation process. Trevor Baylis had gone as far as
yomping across the Namib Desert to test a training shoe which
generated electrical power when the arrest of the alleged ‘Shoe-Bomber’
on board an airline forced him to abandon that particular product
idea.12

Even products which have gained financiers’ hard-earned imprimaturs
as commercial winners can fail when presented to the market. Edwin
Land, best known as inventor of the Polaroid camera, discovered that
the Detroit car industry was just not interested in adopting one of his
early and apparently sure-fire inventions, a polarising filter which could
eliminate headlight glare and thus reduce the hazards of night driving.

Provided that you acknowledge that real life is chaotic, dynamic and
intrusive, however, models fulfil a valuable purpose in providing the
clear structures and transparent frameworks with which to make sense
of those realities. The model of the idea development process which
underpins this book is strongly informed by the outcomes of the
Minnesota Innovation Research Program which started in 1983 and ran
for 17 years. This major project involved over 30 researchers
undertaking longitudinal studies which tracked the development of 14
diverse innovations in real time and in their natural field settings. The
researchers observed that the innovation journey is neither sequential
and orderly nor a matter of random trial and error. They concluded that
‘the innovation journey is a nonlinear cycle of divergent and convergent
activities that may repeat over time and at different organisational
levels if resources are obtained to renew the cycle’.13

This fusion of divergent and convergent activities is echoed by Joline
Godfrey, who founded Odysseum, Inc., an international learning
company serving the Fortune 500. Godfrey considers that the existence
of business plans and the language of business combine to present a
misleading impression of business as a rational process. It was her
direct experience that starting a business was a series of fits and starts,
brainstorms and barriers. As she vividly expressed it: ‘Creating a
business is a round of chance encounters that lead to new opportunities
and ideas, mistakes that turn into miracles.’14