Where Great Ideas Come From

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But every blast leaves a mess in its wake. Amos, fully aware that following up on the best ideas would be the only way to keep them in circulation, created a new-business-development group. The six-member group's mandate is to evaluate, track, and refine the ideas that flood into a centralized database--at a rate averaging six a day--through the company's Web site or intranet, or from phone calls, letters, and E-mail. Furthermore, Amos is also holding monthly two-and-a-half-hour "renewal" meetings for all employees, to provide updates on ideas in development. So far, two major new services--including self-service computing kiosks in hotels--have resulted from Amos's formal idea-development process, and nine more are in the wings.

What brainstorming meetings can do is send the message that employee input is valuable. But to play a more active and consistent role in generating ideas, employees need to be educated. The invitation to participate is most effective if employees know how they can have an effect. That means opening the rest of the process up to them.

Two years ago Will Raap, CEO of Gardener's Supply Inc., a $26-million mail-order business based in Burlington, Vt., granted a half-dozen employees their dream assignment. For six months the employees spent eight hours a week developing their new-product ideas with the help of mentors. The results were more than encouraging: four staffers proved to be so skilled at developing good products that it's become part of their jobs. A woman from the marketing-analysis department got the green light to spend one day a week cultivating a brand-new business--an herb farm on the company's grounds. "We hope she will become a supplier of herb plants and related products for us," notes Raap.

Given the program's success, Raap took the only logical leap: he junked it. What he had was too potent to limit to a few people. "We broadened the initiative to increase the awareness that we need new products and that anyone can come across them," he explains. Today all 120 employees know the critical target numbers, such as the average gross margin dollar per square inch of catalog space, so those who want to come up with a great new product idea know what their goal should be.

"For the last holiday catalog, we got 50 ideas from two-dozen people that buyers could follow up on," brags Raap, who offers employees monetary rewards for their ideas. "Ten got in, and three to four of them were better than average."

So brimming with ideas are some entrepreneurs that they need to make sure they keep track of the inventory that resides in their own brains. CIBT's Brad Cary writes down every business idea he has--a habit he developed in business school. Just logging his ideas into a computer every week can help him assess whether a concept is worthy of future follow-up. "The exercise is as valuable as the idea itself," says Cary.

MYTH 5
'Getting ideas isn't the problem; implementing them is'

Once you've adjusted your own role to make room for idea gathering--as well as motivated and educated your employees to work with the raw material of ideas--there's one more tool you'll need to join the ranks of the top idea generators: a suck index.

That's what Tom Lix calls his version of it, anyway, using language that sounds borrowed from those revered business strategists Beavis and Butt-Head. What the suck index offers is an early-warning system to catch newborn ideas that aren't likely to thrive. Lix, CEO of NewMarket Network, a Web-site developer and marketer in Boston, has his eight employees rank ideas on a scale of 1 to 10 in five areas, including up-front resources required, technical complexity, and legal liability. (For example, how likely is it that someone will sue if NewMarket creates a site for Howard Stern's fans?) If the boss or anyone else should proffer an idea that scores a string of 10s on the suck index--hey, it's nothing personal.

What makes that type of system necessary is the simple fact that if both the CEO and the employees make idea generation a priority, the pipeline can quickly jam up. "We come up with hundreds of ideas and bring a few to market," says CIBT's Brad Cary. Each week, he enters his ideas on a simple form in his computer that allows him to examine target markets, marketing and pricing factors, the estimated start-up capital and time commitment, and the three-year revenue potential. From there, he ranks each one on a feasibility index and a profit index. By multiplying the two, he can "see if it's worth going forward."

The screen-test phase can vary widely among companies. Crunch CEO Doug Levine assesses all ideas in terms of his endlessly repeated mantra: How will this enhance the brand? (That helps explain why the gym chain has expanded into clothes, books, and videos.) At the other end of the spectrum, Mail Boxes Etc. uses a scale of minus 2 to 2 for each of 20 criteria, which are weighted to arrive at a total score; Jinwoong, the sporting-goods marketer, uses an "eight-link chain" model for managing decisions about potential new products; the links detail the company's strengths in eight areas, such as distribution and in-store merchandising.

It can seem as if such tools take all the fun out of the process, forcing every flight of imagination to crash-land in a mountain of paperwork. But with lots of ideas, such a phase doesn't render a simple death sentence; after being rejuvenated and reappearing in a slightly rejiggered state, some ideas return to pass with flying colors. Then there are the ideas for which any screen is beside the point.

Like the one Jinwoong's Scott Reeves points to as a current favorite, a simple project-management tool he calls a "product-development system," a calendar that enables managers to keep better track of key deadlines as they create multiple new products. Reeves had no hesitation about giving the idea, intended for his company's internal use, a thumbs-up.

After all, he has new-product meetings scheduled for almost every week this year.

Susan Greco is an articles editor at Inc.

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