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Innovation based on a bright idea probably outnumbers all other categories taken together. Seven or eight out of every ten patents belong to this category. Here are a few examples of “bright ideas” such as the zipper, the ballpoint pen, the aerosol spray can, the tab to open soft drink or beer cans, etc. The research in many businesses aims at finding and exploiting bright ideas, whether for a new flavor in breakfast cereals or soft drinks, for a better running shoe.
Risk Factor
These bright innovation ideas are the riskiest and least successful source of innovative opportunities. The casualty rate is enormous. No more than one out of every hundred patents for innovation of this kind earns enough to pay back development costs and patent fees. A far smaller proportion, perhaps as low as one in five hundred, makes any money above its out-of-pocket costs.
And no one knows which ideas for innovation based on a bright idea have a chance to succeed and which ones are likely to fail. Why did the aerosol can succeed, for instance? And why did a dozen or more similar inventions fail? Why does one universal wrench sell and most of the many others disappear? Why did the zipper find acceptance and practically displace buttons, even though it tends to jam? (After all, a jammed zipper on a dress, jacket, or pair of trousers can be quite embarrassing.)
Success Predictability
Attempts to improve the predictability of innovations based on bright ideas have not been particularly successful. Similarly, it’s very difficult to identify the personal traits, behavior, or habits that make for a successful innovator. “Successful inventors,” an old adage says, “keep on inventing. They play the odds. If they try often enough, they will succeed.”
This belief that you’ll win if only you keep on trying out bright ideas is, however, no more rational than the popular fallacy that to win the jackpot at Las Vegas one only has to keep on pulling the lever. The more often you pull, the more often you lose.
Some successful inventors have had only one brilliant idea and then quit: the inventor of the zipper, for instance, or of the ballpoint pen. And there are hundreds of inventors around who have forty patents to their name, and not one winner. Innovators do, of course, improve with practice. But only if they practice the right method, that is, if they base their work on a systematic analysis of the sources of innovative opportunity.
Bright ideas are vague and elusive. Do you think that anyone except the inventor of the zipper ever thought that buttons or hooks-and-eyes were inadequate to fasten clothing? Or anyone but the inventor of the ballpoint pen could have defined what, if anything, was unsatisfactory about that nineteenth-century invention, the fountain pen. What need was satisfied by the electric toothbrush, one of the market successes of the 1960s? It still has to be hand-held, after all.
Even if the need can be defined, the solution cannot usually be specified. That people sitting in their cars in a traffic jam would like some diversion was perhaps not so difficult to figure out. But why did the small TV set which Sony developed around 1965 to satisfy this need fail in the marketplace, whereas the far more expensive car stereo succeeded? In retrospect, it is easy to answer this. But could it possibly have been answered in a prospect?
Way Ahead
The entrepreneur is therefore well advised to forgo innovations based on bright ideas, however enticing the success stories. After all, somebody wins a jackpot on the Las Vegas slot machines every week, yet the best anyone slot-machine player can do is try not to lose more than that person can afford.
An entrepreneurial economy cannot dismiss a proud connection with innovation based on a bright idea. Individual innovation of this kind is not predictable, cannot be organized, cannot be systematized, and fails in the overwhelming majority of cases. Also many, very many, are trivial from the start. There are always more patent applications for new can openers, for new wig stands, and for new belt buckles than for anything else. The volume of such bright-idea innovation is so large that the tiny percentage of successes represents a substantial source of new businesses, new jobs, and new performance capacity for the economy. There is little society can do, perhaps, to promote such innovation. One cannot promote what one does not understand. But at least society should not discourage, penalize, or make difficult such innovations.
“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” – Peter F. Drucker
Solution-Oriented Approach
I have seen that the best strategy for impactful innovation or rather a mega improvement in a business is to question the existing system. Question it in terms of your focus areas as cost, cycle time, customer satisfaction, safety, delivery, efficiency, etc. Once you set your focus area, then do the brainstorming to work out the solutions for it.
Here is one real example. The tracking of diesel consumption & related billing were the cause of concern in one construction MNC. It was involving a high number of equipment & vehicle at different sites while carrying out construction-related activities. Diesel consumption was ranging from Lacs of liters weekly, costing crore of rupees.
This team has taken input from concerned team members & listed all the issues related to the complete chain of diesel, starting from its purchase to final consumption. They find out several loopholes in the complete process. Then it was time to find out the solutions for all the major issues. One by one they solved these issues. Some of the solutions were like tracking the movements & ON-OFF conditions of these types of machinery by implementing IoT (Internet of Things). This was a completely new concept.
With this, false billing stopped, as there was a proper record of the idling of these types of machinery. Contracts were revised based on newly available data. Overall consumption of diesel was also tracked, then a central purchase policy was defined, which resulted in several CRORES of SAVING yearly. (Inspired by ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ by Peter Drucker)
