A Few Ideas for Beleaguered Innovators
Keep the faith. That’s what I said to a client who is going through a crisis of confidence. Over the summer he had put together the underpinnings of what on paper looked like a promising growth business. But — as is usually the case — the more he analyzes, the more he doubts; the more he shows the results of his analysis to senior leaders, the more questions they ask, and the more they doubt.
If you are doing something that hasn’t been done before, careful analysis will by definition highlight reasons to not proceed. Market demand can’t be validated. Experts dismiss technological assumptions. Partnership discussions stall. There is always something that causes this crisis of confidence. Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has seen this so frequently that she coined Kanter’s Law: Everything can look like a failure in the middle. When you first formulate an idea, excitement peaks. But the more you study that idea, the more you realize the challenges that lie in front of you.
Innovators need a heavy dose of faith. They need to trust their intuition that they are working on a big idea. That faith need not be blind. For example, I combine well-grounded research that highlights patterns of successful innovation and my own field experience into a short checklist of factors that indicate whether or not an idea has potential (in a future post I’ll provide more color about using this checklist). I make sure there’s a good story behind the idea. Dissenters may poke holes in the story, but at least it’s there.
Read the rest at Scott’s Harvard Business Review blog.
Scott D. Anthony is managing director of Innosight Asia-Pacific.
