Some of the best business ideas are unplanned. They come through everyday experiences or thought processes that feel more subconscious than deliberate. How and why breakthroughs happen is often seen as a mystery or an act of spontaneous creativity.
But it's also possible to engineer such breakthroughs, and we've outlined how to do just that in our new book, Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters. The book distills the lessons we've learned in the 10 years since starting Stanford's Masters of Creativity speaker series and the d.school's Design Leadership Lab and LaunchPad Accelerator. Here are some of the book's key lessons for entrepreneurs.
Don't have just one idea; have many.
There's a dangerous myth in Silicon Valley that it's possible to create a business out of thin air--and that there's a type of person who's supposedly able to do such conjuring. But here's the problem: The theory is just not correct. The human brain is incapable of creating something from nothing. Ideas are connections between two or more things we already know.
In fact, research conducted by Stanford professor Bob Sutton found that on average, it takes 2,000 ideas to get to one commercial success. And that's exactly what our own experience--and history--confirms. James Dyson famously built 5,126 prototypes of the bagless vacuum cleaner before the 5,127th iteration worked. The head of Taco Bell's Food Lab describes trying thousands of variations of the "Doritos Locos" taco shell alone before getting it right (and thank goodness he kept trying). And when it comes to pharmaceutical breakthroughs? The ratio of failure to success is about 10,000 to 1. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Linus Pauling said it best: "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
Ignore the experts, and listen to novices.
British mathematician Lord Kelvin told the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900 that there was "nothing new to be discovered in physics," and that "all that remains is more and more precise measurement." He was of course wrong, as just five years later, Albert Einstein would write a series of papers--establishing his theory of special relativity and the famous E = mc2 equation--that would transform the way we see the world.
When a young Denys Overhauser unveiled the mathematically informed design of the stealth bomber to the rest of Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunk Works, the head of the aerodynamics division supposedly suggested he be burnt at the stake. The aircraft challenged so many fundamental assumptions about aircraft design that it was internally dubbed "the hopeless diamond" project among engineers who had slide rules older than Overhauser. But ultimately, innovation triumphed over conventional wisdom, as the bomber registered a radar signal a thousandth the size of the next-best design ever made.
Radical leaps of invention are rare and when they do happen, interestingly enough, novices often make the boldest leaps, simply because they don't know the rules of the game. So when looking for new ideas, don't listen to just those at the top. When markets are stable, the rules change slowly. In a dynamic competitive environment with rapid change, expertise about what's worked in the past can be a liability. Richard Feynman famously declined an appointment at Einstein's physics institute at Princeton specifically because the position didn't require him to teach: "The questions of the students are often the source of new research," he recounts in his memoir, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
Little data trumps big data.
Every entrepreneur wonders how much time they should dedicate to one idea or another. In searching for the answer, many turn to surveys, which are cheap and easy to create and offer insights using large collections of data. So, when the founders in our accelerator at Stanford, LaunchPad, hear us advocate for little data, they often do a double-take.
Little data--the kind that a couple of founders can create through a series of cleverly devised, scrappy experiments--comes from decision moments that reveal actual human behavior, rather than hypotheticals.
A team we advised at a global real estate company almost got fooled by big data. They'd surveyed thousands of people in the food court about the possibility of putting a beer garden on the fourth floor of a major city center's premier mall. More than 80 percent of people surveyed said they'd visit. Thankfully, the team responsible for the initiative implemented a little-data mindset, and with a few scrappy experiments advertising a new beer garden in the mall, learned that it didn't drive nearly enough new traffic to the fourth floor to justify the expense of retrofitting the space, at a fraction of what they would have ordinarily spent. Little data saved them several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The takeaway? Anyone can innovate.
All in all, a lot of the mythology around innovation has been empirically debunked, but that's yet to make its way into the broader consciousness. Creativity and entrepreneurship remain shrouded in mystery, and that's a shame. Innovation is a learned skill, a developable capability. With effort and attention, every single person is capable of the kinds of "zero to one" innovations that have previously been attributable to the chosen few.
by JEREMY UTLEY & PERRY KLEBAHN
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