October 2023: Finding and filtering winning ideas
When it comes to innovating, it all starts with ideas.
If you’re looking for the next big product or service to excite your customers, you need to start finding ideas that customers love.
It’s important to remember that failing is inevitable. Between 80-99% of all new ideas are terrible. That’s why you need to follow these steps to start spotting the ideas that might be worth investing in:
1. Make sure you’re capturing your ideas in a central list or tool
Consolidate ideas across your company, to avoid silos, missed opportunities and miscommunication.
2. Remember that all ideas are worth capturing
You never know what your customers might love that surprises you.
3. Beware the voting trap
This is not an idea popularity contest. Votes are opinions and opinions mean nothing –what matters is data, which we get by testing ideas.
4. Source ideas from as many diverse places and people as possible
Places you can look for ideas include: hackdays, suppliers, tech scans, partners, customers, venture teams and more.
And, make sure you get all staff involved. Remember, ideas are not only the realm of innovation, marketing or product teams. Technology, IT, legal, risk, people and culture, front line support, sales, and so on, all have great ideas.
Once you have your ideas, it’s time to prioritise them and work out what’s really worth exploring. In my video, I explain how to decide what to test:
What comes next?
Finding ideas worth exploring is just the first step in the innovation process.
Download our guide for the five steps to innovate rapidly, where you'll learn how to prioritise your ideas, test them, validate them, and measure the results so you can start taking action to build a product or service that your customers actually want.
One thing
"Assuming that all ideas are good encourages hundreds of hours of wasted effort studying the problem, writing plans, putting together task forces, etc. — all without any feedback from the real world about whether it’s actually a good idea or not.
Our job as entrepreneurs is to take those (bad) ideas and figure out a quick, cheap, and easy way to find out why they are bad. That’s the only way to begin the process of testing and iteration that — if we’re lucky — will eventually bring us to something that works."
— Marc Randolph, Co-Founder & first CEO of Netflix