Page 21 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

!low do von iletelmine what has potentially signiticant - 101
value? Sometimes by analysis. Sometimes by intuition. CREATIVE
Value is relative, both to the value systems of the evaluator PROPLEM
SOLVING
and to the time during which the creation occurs. For ex- TECHWOUE
ample, twelve Hollywood studios turned down the "Star
Wars" movie concept. Finally Twentieth Century Fox agreed 7
to take the risk and made the most financially successful
movie of all time. Similarly, some inventors and their inves-
tors offered to sell a new idea to IBM, General Motors,

DuPont, and several other major firms and were turned down
by all of them. Finally, they decided to build and market the
product themselves and became multimillionaires. The pro-
cess was photocopying. The company became Xerox. 9

Even successful entrepreneurs may misjudge the value of a
creation and, hence, its potential to become an innovation.
Victor Kiam, of Remington Razor fame, was once offered the
patent to Velcro for $25,000; he turned it down, believing it
had no future. 1° Velcro products have sold for about $6 bil-
lion since their inception through 1988.

Later in this book, in Chapter 6,
some ways for determining
whether a product is innova-
tive will be discussed.

The Possibilities

For innovation to occur, the pos-
sibilities for creativity and in-
novation must exist. Regard-
less of your creative talents,
however great your knowledge
or skill, you will not be able to
create many innovations if you
are not functioning in a fa-
vorable situation. If the
organization's culture, in the broad-
est sense, does not support and even
require innovation, it is unlikely that innovation will occur.
The evidence indicates that organizational innovation results
from careful management of the organization's culture. This
can be readily understood in terms Of managing the