Innovation: Who is the best judge of ideas?

Great minds think alike. The greatest go ahead and patent it.

There is only one thing that hurts more than saying “Why didn’t I think of it?” after reading about a new invention. And that is having to say, “I had actually thought about it a few months ago and didn’t realize it was a good idea”. Around the world, it is estimated that the conversion rate of ideas to usable products is about 0.000002%. That means roughly 2 in every million ideas are taken forward to be fashioned into some meaningful product. I can assure you that’s a conservative estimate, and the real number is far less.

In any case, the gist of it is, a lot of ideas come to people and very few of them are worth pursuing. But then, what separates a good innovation ecosystem from the rest is how these viable ideas are identified and brought forward through a good judging process. In the million ideas, there may be 50-100 more ideas that are actually usable, but fall by the wayside because no one was able to appreciate the merit. Famous examples in technology are the mouse and graphical user interfaces, which were originally invented by engineers at Xerox, where they were both dismissed as ideas which are of no use to people. Other companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc swooped in and took it from them with minimal effort. Also think of the first few talent show judges who rejected Elvis Presley and The Beatles as not worth it.

Now that thought typically has two types of effect on the people of an organization:

1. Potential innovators gain in confidence, thinking their ideas may have more merit than others have been giving them credit for.

2. People in charge of filtering ideas may get more nervous, fearing “How can I reject an idea today, if it may come back tomorrow as a huge commercial success and mock me?”

So, does this mean that a culture of innovation will cause some not-so-good ideas to pass through the filter and generally lower the standards? Yes, but this would again indicate a flaw in the evaluation mechanism, rather than the idea generation engines. Do not let the former kill the latter. In the world of journalists, we often lament the many writers who have died on the editors’ table. This is more or less the same plague that has affected innovators of modern times.