Research and development departments and innovation teams need to be constantly coming up with new ideas. In fact, to solve a given problem they may need 40, 50, maybe even 100 ideas. Then they need to go through each one of them and get rid of the ones that don’t make sense, might cost too much money, or even take too long to implement. This means that an R&D department needs to be able to kick out unwanted creative ideas without upsetting the creativity of the team, or causing creative genius egos to go astray.
It’s difficult to tell someone on a creative team in the R & D department that their idea sucks, or that it is totally unworkable. Nevertheless, there has to be a way to cull the creative ideas that are unfeasible, keeping the ones that have potential. Some say that is more important than the ideas themselves. This is because the creative flow is an ongoing process and after you solve one problem you will be working on another, but if the creative team is not on the same page or stops participating because they figure that their creative ideas will be canceled, then fortunately they may stop creating.
This may not seem like an important issue, but it is. Each member of the creative team must consider themselves an important part of the Corporation, and feel respected and valued otherwise they will start treating their employment as just a job. If this happens they will no longer bring their passion and creative genius to the table. Interestingly enough, when trying to solve a problem usually the first 20 ideas are not very good. And when you get into the second 20 ideas, you usually will find one that will work extremely well.
Still, you have to get rid of the other 20 ideas somehow, forgetting about them completely, so you can move on. But you must be very careful because as you progress in the innovation of the project you may need to come back and look at some of those other ideas as a possible solution to solve the problem that you created with failed prototypes. This is why it’s important to record each and every brainstorming session or creative meeting of the minds during the problem solving process. I hope you will please consider all these issues, because this is experience I’ve learned the hard way. Think on it.
