Welcome to the future – Part II

Let’s make one thing clear: it’s a really good idea to get a really good idea! Who wouldn’t have loved to be the inventor of the plastic cup, the baby pacifier, or the ice cube tray? Huge industries are built upon good ideas.

A shipping company had been in the business for some 70 years when someone said: “hey, why don’t we ship goods in containers?” At the time it took 108 workers five days to load a ship. With containerisation 8 workers did the same in one day.
As the story goes, consultants actually told the shipping company not to move into the container business. “It will be too risky and expensive”, they said. The company chose to reply: “well, thank you but we are going to do it anyway”. It’s a tricky business to analyse and measure “good ideas”. Often their genius doesn’t show till much later. And it takes guts and hard work to believe you can do it. Especially when all the clever people tell you it’s not possible.

We can’t just ask and expect customers to give us the good ideas. Well, I might ask for more mushrooms on my pie but how would I come up with say the vitamin pill, the cell phone or pasta ketchup? But just because I can’t articulate needs with words doesn’t mean I don’t crave for them. Tampax is a great example. The female hygiene has never been a “proper” topic in conversations. Even today it’s still a bit dangerous and we make sure to use blue liquids in commercials. Wealthy women in the old days had a small oven which they could bring along when travelling. Its function was to burn the “waste” and if you didn’t have one of these you’d have to hide and bury plastic aprons, lambs wool and old rags. So when the first tampons were released on the market it was indeed a really good idea, not to mention an idea that potentially targeted half the world’s population. But you couldn’t have asked women because no one would ever talk about it least admit that they had “a problem”. In the first boxes of tampons it was even necessary to put a small note that said, “Please, hand me a new box of tampons”. This meant that ladies didn’t need to be embarrassed in front of the clerk.

We all talk about them – the good ideas – but what are they really and where do they come from? Some might say, “Hey, I’m sure if we wait long enough it’ll just come to us”. If you want to be a little more serious than that you could also take six of your best engineers, add coffee and Danish, shake them a bit, and then wait for them to produce one. And who knows, maybe they do. It might even be a really good one. Unfortunately it’s still a rather random approach that doesn’t provide the answers to the big questions: where do ideas originate from? And why? How? And how do we keep on finding them? Oh, and how can it be done faster, cheaper and better as well?

Meanwhile in China they are educating themselves in “reverse engineering”, which basically means finding good western products, take them apart, copy them and sell them to us and the rest of the world for a fraction of the price.

Our society would benefit immensely if we had more focus on generating “good ideas”. In fact it should start with our primary education. As it is today, we’re still taught to wait for an assignment. When we get one we’re rewarded with a break at the end. And it’s still considered cheating to do a “china man” i.e. to peek over a shoulder for an answer. It isn’t quite in harmony with how the real world works!

Have you ever been asked: “Do you know how not to take initiative?” “Do you know how not to formulate a problem?” “Are you clueless about everything you don’t know?”

Its funny but good ideas are not based on what we know. Good ideas start out with everything we don’t know! Our existing knowledge only helps us to be creative!

We gave you a few small assignments last week (link). Maybe you did them? Maybe you didn’t? In fact, we know summer is around the corner and we’re not doing them ourselves! But we don’t try to tease you neither. We’d love you to do them eventually because they will make it a lot easier for you to grasp our way of creating a “good idea”. We call it the Future Based Ideas Development™.

We don’t create the future on Thursday afternoons. We do it all the time. It’s a routine.

We’re looking for new perspectives on something we already know. And we ask ourselves, “does what I see create value? Is it meaningful to people? And can it be put in to the real world?

Edison said, “Possibilities are often overlooked because they are wearing overalls and are perceived as very hard work”.

The good ideas are out there but most people just don’t want see them. Do you?

Let the hunt begin!

By Anne Skare Nielsen
& Liselotte Lyngsø