In praise of ideas

Today we’ve got a great interview with legendary author, speaker and thinker Edward De Bono, which should be required reading for any entrepreneur who wants to make their organisation more innovative.

De Bono’s argument is that innovation is a term used too loosely in business – managers and business owners like to say they run innovative companies, but then rarely do anything about it.

In fact, in some organisations, too much innovation is seen as a bad thing. Managers need to run their business units hard, focussing on productivity and profitability above all else. Time spent thinking of new ideas is simply time wasted, in the eyes of some.

But De Bono argues – and it’s very logical, really – that failing to think creatively about your business is as big a mistake as failing to think about risk management.

Developing new products, new production methods, new ways to cut costs, without some element of deliberate, strategic, creative thinking, is simply not possible.

De Bono travels the world giving very expensive seminars to big companies on these topics. Here are some nuggets that SMEs can start putting in place today:

• Have a “hit list” of areas where you’d like to generate ideas (it might be a problem area in the business or a new area you’d like to get into and make it visible to everyone to think about.
• Appoint a chief ideas officer, to capture, assess, encourage and promote ideas.
• Look at ways to make creative thinking systemic (something people do regularly) rather than irregular (something people do once a year offsite).
• Work to spot good creative thinkers from all levels of your business and allow time and space to think about stuff. This time is not wasted.

De Bono says most entrepreneurs are natural creative thinkers – they came up with the idea for their business, after all.

This gives them a big advantage over large companies, an advantage they can ram home with robust ideas generation.