The Innovation Tournament Handbook by Christian Terwiesch

Author:Christian Terwiesch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wharton School Press

Increasing Variance in the Quality of Ideas

Consider a pool of 200 ideas with an average quality of 5 on a scale from 0 to 10. The more variance there is in the quality of those ideas, the more 10s you’ll have in the pool. Two hundred ideas uniformly distributed from 0 to 10 is a much more favorable distribution than 200 ideas all near the mean value of 5, even if the uniform distribution also results in a bunch of zeros. Here are some ways to increase the variance in the quality of ideas in your tournaments:

1.  Increase variance in the sources of ideas. In a healthcare setting, don’t limit the pool to the physicians. Include administrators, nurses, and patients. When faced with a challenge in improving an industrial process, include process engineers, equipment operators, suppliers, university researchers, and people working on analogous processes in unrelated industries.

2.  Explore extreme hypotheticals in both need and solution. On the need side, consider what would be required for the need to disappear. Or consider how the need would be addressed if it were 100 times more important to the stakeholder—the only thing that mattered. On the solution side, how would the best approach differ if cost were no obstacle? What solution would be adopted if energy were free or bandwidth unlimited?

3.  Ensure independent exploration. As much as we endorse Osborn’s “encourage wild ideas,” we aren’t crazy about his prescription to “build on the ideas of others.” In our research, we’ve found that building on others’ ideas results in derivative ideas that are less variant in quality. New employee orientation involving paragliding is indeed a wild idea, but building on that to suggest skydiving doesn’t uncover much new territory (and definitely raises your workers’ comp insurance premiums). Increase variance by ensuring your idea generation process engages diverse individuals in independent exploration.

4.  Prime the process. We typically provide participants in our tournament workshops with a sheet containing what we call emergency stimuli, a set of questions related to the innovation challenge. These prompts are intended to nudge people when they’re stuck. We prefer to invoke the stimuli only after individuals have struggled a bit without direction to ensure we capture their own top-of-mind thinking. Humans connect dots very well, and the stimuli need not be overly specific or detailed to work. For example, when considering healthcare innovation challenges, stimuli might include the following:

a.  What opportunities are enabled by ubiquitous mobile computing technology?

b.  What’s a recent frustration that you’ve experienced with the healthcare system?

c.  What are the implications of an aging population for healthcare?

d.  How would Google approach this challenge? How about Amazon?

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