How big is your idea, and does size matter?

By Jelke de Boer on 4 January 2010

To be able to survive in a global market we need innovation. We need a creative industry, and most of all we need ideas. Preferably good ideas but just a whole bunch of ideas would do for now. Let’s start by having a look at the word “idea”. What is an idea? And what makes one idea a good one and another one bad? It’s mostly circumstantial so there is no easy way to sepa-rate the good from the bad and the ugly. What we can do is look at the scale of an idea. I think we can divide the world of ideas and concepts into three different domains; there’s great inventions, big innovations and small improvements.

Great inventions are the really big ideas that shape our human culture. Inventions open new perspectives and give new directions to our lives. Inventions can be quite abstract, they don’t need a material form or a specific use. It’s the invention of stone tools and the use of fire that got us started as a civilisation in the first place, the exact way we used stones does not really matter nor does the technique we used to make fire. Inventions are the bottom of our creative food chain.

Big innovations feed directly on inventions. They are the material representation of inventions and make them really come to life. In a way they make inventions useful. It’s great if you know you can use a fire to warm yourself, but if you don’t have a way to start one yourself its not something you’d really care about. It can take an awful lot of time before an invention pays back in innovations. Think, for example, about the invention of electricity. Some place it as far back as 600 BC when Thales of Miletos mentions it. More mainstream the original invention took place around 1600 AD. The world’s first battery, the Leyden Jar, was developed much later in 1745. Still it took at least another century to come up with more ideas to make electricity useful. By that time we finally got something nice, it’s the thing we all still recognise as a brilliant idea: The light bulb!

Last but not least there’s the small improvements. They shape innovations into a form that makes them mostly harmless in real life use. Was the light bulb that great at start? Or has it evolved to a much more sophisticated and off course cheaper product? Small improvements are at the top of the creative food chain. They are parasitising all the hard work done before without any intention of contributing more to mankind then making some kind of product more safe and pleasant.

One of the main things frustrating the creative process is the urge to come up with an idea in the first or at least the second category. Most brainstorming formula’s will enforce that feeling, size does matter! Can you please leave your narrow minded comfort zone and be creative for once? We want more original ideas! But why all the fuzz if you’re actually just thinking about something as small as product innovation? Most problems (or challenges if you prefer the marketing terminology) don’t need world changing solutions. They need an improvement to make life less complicated and more enjoyable, it’s not about something completely new but on how we experience existing products or services.

If it comes to ideas its good to have a small one.

tagged with: creative industries, innovation, ideas, experience

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