Page 218 - Free the Idea Monkey

SUPPORT IDEA PARENTING
You’ve seen this movie: You are

involved in an amazing new product
development program and you and the
team deliver. You uncover a huge insight
and hole in the marketplace that somehow
your competitors have missed. The insight
is so clear, the gap so big, that immediately
product ideas to meet it begin to flow. You can even
picture how this new product or service will look.

Your work is done. You leave the project glowing
with pride.

Flash forward 12 months to the meeting where
the next round of innovations to be launched are
being unveiled. Your idea is presented, only it is not pre-
sented. It barely resembles the idea you helped conceive.
What has happened to your beautiful baby?

I chose that baby metaphor on purpose.
Spend enough time around innovation and you become
aware of a startling fact: ideas are just like children. Ideas
need a loving set of parents to conceive them, encourage
them, challenge them and protect them until they are
ready to stand on their own. Good parenting will produce
ideas—born as simple insights—that literally change the
world. Good innovation is just like good parenting.
The problem is, as a rule, we as corporate executives/
parents abandon our nurturing role too early. And just like
in any family (or company), once the core set of parents is
gone, the child/insight suffers.
The abandonment isn’t deliberate—just a remnant
of the way things used to be done. Despite all the talk
about wanting to create “flat organizations,” companies
still have the bad habit of creating silos when it comes to
research, marketing, R&D and sales.

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