Where Great Ideas Come From

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Two years ago Oakshire Mushroom's Gary Schroeder and three managers started playing with a seemingly ridiculous idea--selling a product to competitors--while trying to address how to stem the loss of the company's 40% market share in shiitake mushrooms. "We kicked around a lot of ideas--franchising, expanding geographically to be more local" to supermarket and restaurant customers, Schroeder explains. "But these other competitors were already there."

So Schroeder and his team arrived at an unconventional solution: they'd sell their expertise to rival farms. Oakshire Mushroom's claim to fame is a sawdust log for growing shiitakes that reduces the harvest time from four years to four months. The choice has paid off: sales increased 45%, to $5 million last year, and Schroeder expects to double sales this year.

Doug Levine knows where he needs help: figuring out which of his often-oddball ideas actually have promise. The CEO of Crunch, an innovative New York City-based chain of gyms whose offerings include gospel aerobics and coed wrestling, gets his 30-person staff together weekly to discuss the offbeat ideas he gathers from all over: clothing and computer trade shows, restaurants, clubs, and competing gyms. From a visit to the clothing store Old Navy, Levine got a merchandising idea for the gyms: the company logo, emblazoned on canvas, draws customers' attention to high shelves loaded with clothing inventory.

Levine even makes the time for strangers who've read about his company and who phone in their own ideas. "Some of them are pretty crazy, but I listen to them all," he says.

Scott Reeves, president of Jinwoong Inc. USA, a $57-million division of a Korean camping-equipment powerhouse that's turned out more than 2,000 tent models alone, seeks inventors out. He puts communing with outsiders on his regular to-do list, talking to a dozen or so each year, choosing those whose notions sound the most plausible. Reeves's 1996 meeting with an Arizona inventor quickly led to the development of the Connection Tent, a two-room tent connected by a tunnel, which accounted for more than $5 million in sales in its first year. One of Jinwoong's latest creations, an ungainly two-legged sleeping bag, originated when a New Zealand inventor came to Jinwoong with "a rough prototype," says Reeves.

MYTH 3
'If you listen to customers, they'll tell you what to do'

What Cameron Kuhn is about to say would be considered heresy in some quarters, where CEOs have come to believe (much to the annoyance of their salespeople) that tagging along with salespeople is a can't-miss strategy for collecting ideas. "I love my customers, but to meet with them would really muddy the waters," insists Kuhn. "I just want to bring them better new products. I have a great sales team. They have the customer relationships--why would I want to step into the middle of that?"

Even CEOs who see the virtues of face time with customers believe that it's only as useful as the process it's part of. "Buyers have so much on their plate. They can't identify all the trends," says Jinwoong's Reeves. "If you have the right product at the right time at the right price, many times a customer will adapt to what you've done." Even Kuhn concedes that he'll consort with a small group of key accounts once an idea has moved into the testing stage.

Aside from reacting to what's already on the table, customers can help out by identifying unmet needs. But for a CEO (or a salesperson, for that matter) to distill a workable idea from what customers say requires much more than merely nodding attentively; the suggestions must be filtered through an ever-more-detailed screen of knowledge about what ideas suit the company.

"We listen to our customers but not in a traditional sense," says Brad Cary, president of CIBT Inc., a $12-million provider of visa, passport, and other international-travel services, in McLean, Va. "You have to read between the lines."

Back in 1992, for example, Cary got a call from a potential customer looking for help in streamlining the process for obtaining visas for workers heading overseas. "When the customer described the problem, we realized the solution would be a specific software program," says Cary. "Of course, we weren't in the software business at the time, but we decided on the spot that we could do it."

The customer's people, he adds, "just knew they needed help." Within a few years, that project had evolved into a proprietary system that has enabled CIBT to capture more revenues from four big customers.

MYTH 4
'It takes only one brainstorming meeting to generate more ideas than we can handle'

Late last year someone stopped Jim Amos in the hall and stuffed a bunch of papers into his hands. Amos, CEO of Mail Boxes Etc., listened intently as a member of the finance and accounting department detailed an idea he had for how Mail Boxes Etc. could offer more technical services to the home-office market. His idea "merited looking at," recalls Amos.

It's that kind of incident that convinces Amos that meetings aren't enough. Ideas are best shaped through an ongoing companywide dialogue; what happens between get-togethers can be every bit as crucial as what happens during them. "Ideas come out of those meetings, if not at them," he says. "Every company has a collective mind."

Amos set about getting that mind working within his first 90 days of taking over as CEO in 1996. At a companywide strategic-planning session--to which he invited, among others, the company's top 50 franchisees, as well as vendors and board members--he solicited ideas that would take the company forward and still fit its culture. The result? "An explosion of ideas," he says.

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