The future gets old very quickly

 

Seeing the light and having a Eureka moment is great. The buzz lasts almost a minute.

Then another e-mail comes in and all that promise is diluted, maybe even forgotten. And there goes another great idea.

It’s even worse for Open Innovators. They get hit with a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of great ideas. How do you even read that many?

Coming up with ideas is brilliant fun. Everyone gets involved and has their say. We may even plot a roadmap based on whatever the senior person in the room said that day. And then the coloured pens and flip charts get put away and we all go back to our desks having had a great day and some nice biscuits – and nothing changes.

As they say: “Innovation without execution is ideation / delusion.” Choose your favourite quote; there are loads. It isn’t because we don’t want to make a difference. Every single one of us does. It’s just that we don’t know how to.

The company strategy is usually ‘to be the best thing and to give customers their best experience’ (they all do) but really, how does that happen?

By knowing which horse to back.

Being able to see the ideas you’ve got on the table laid out side by side with a relative and weighted scoring is so helpful. This allows us to see the probability of Idea A being successful over Idea B. Even if it can’t predict exactly how successful, being roughly right is much better than being completely wrong.

More than this, when we apply knowledge gained about the future market (consumer trends, competitive activity, regulatory factors, probable technology state), we can see when an idea will meet its moment. It’s likely that among all the ideas you have generated but haven’t launched, there are some great ones just waiting for their time. Couldn’t you use a rationale for their development?

This isn’t all conjecture. room44 has a methodology that will provide a rated view of your ideas and set them side by side so you can review them comparatively. We call it our CRiTT Test.

The test has four elements:

  • Commercial factors
  • Regulatory landscape
  • Technical feasibility
  • Time

The future may be a foreign land, but having a view of it isn’t.

Future thinking. Future proofing. Innovation justified. It’s what we do at room44.

 

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