Big Ideas are Getting Harder to Find- how to overcome?

In an MIT Sloan Management Review article, upon referring to research productivity trend analysis, researchers of Sandford University lamented the rarity of finding big ideas. They concluded that “great ideas are getting harder to find.” In pursuit of finding great ideas, almost two decades ago, management guru Davenport came up with a book title—”what is the big idea?” Like these scholars, we are believers in big ideas—Eureka. But are there big ideas? Surprisingly, No. Well, are not Light bulbs, Smartphones, Digital cameras, Steam engines, Automobiles, Televisions, Computers, Airplanes, and many more? Of course, they are. But irrespective of greatness, none of them emerged as big ideas. At the beginning of their lifecycle, hardly people recognized them as great ideas, as they could not show miracle performance in performing target jobs. They do not emerge; we grow them layer by layer like a pearl.

Big ideas surface by keeping the potential latent. Over the decades or centuries, they grow big through the addition of strength layer after layer by a Flow of Ideas. The challenge is to detect the amenability of creating the flow of ideas. More importantly, it demands systematic idea creation for adding momentum by each idea, like how the flywheel effect is created through a series of consistent pushes. Invariably, it requires underlying science to generate ideas to make the technology increasingly better and cheaper. Otherwise, we will rarely find them or create a flurry of them like popcorn machines to create a random effect, building no momentum. In retrospect, the growth journey of great inventions gives lessons about how they keep growing from the embryonic beginning into a big one. 

Empathy and Passion for Perfection for growing big ideas

To keep getting ideas for growing the latent potential of great infant ideas, we need to focus on Getting jobs done. Empathy and passion for perfection are the internal drivers of innovators to figuring out insights in helping target jobs done better. For example, Radio, Television, or Cell phone emerged with primitive capability in getting target jobs done. For instance, TV images were poor. Radio signals were noisy, and Cellphone handsets were quite bulky. Hence, innovators focused on getting ideas for improving picture quality, reducing noise, and making the user side of the cell phone smaller. For an endless period, innovators need deep empathy and passion for perfection to keep this mission going.     

Exploiting existing technology through incremental advancement:

We need a flow of ideas for adding layer after layer value for creating the flywheel effect for growing big ideas. But how to get them. As all of them contain certain technology cores, we need to keep exploiting them in an incremental manner. For example, the silicon processing idea is around photolithography technology core. Hence, we have been incrementally progressing it to keep making silicon processing ideas growing. This is about the exploitation of existing technology core. But such exploitation demands systematic investigation in producing ideas instead of randomly generating them.    

Sustaining Innovation in competitive space:

Once an innovation is released in the market, its willingness to pay (WtoP) keeps getting affected by two major forces—externalities and competition. Although externality brings positive effects, competition pushes the WtoP down. As a result, the WtoP keeps drifting downward. Hence, innovators need to keep releasing successive better versions to sustain a great idea in the market. This is sustaining innovation act also helps innovation gain momentum and diffuse deeper in the market. Hence, sustaining innovation keeps nurturing ideas to grow bigger. For example, the sale of the iPhone 1 came down to zero within just one year. Hence, to sustain its position in the market, Apple released the next version—iPhone 3G. Since then, Apple has been releasing successive better versions for sustaining and growing its position in the market—and making iPhone idea grow.

Exploring and reinventing existing technology core of big ideas:

Despite greatness, exploitation of every technology core through incremental advancement reaches saturation. For example, the TV idea’s cathode display technology (CRT) core reached saturation after almost 100 years of incremental advancement. Similarly, film technology core of Cameras or filament technology core of light bulbs reached saturation. As a result, big inventions stop growing. We need to reinvent big ideas by changing the technology core to overcome it. For this reason, incandescent light bulbs have become LED ones. Similarly, we have changed the film technology core of the camera with an electronic image sensor.

As reinvention takes place through the change of mature technology cores with emerging ones, our journey of incrementally advancing the preferred technology core resumes. Although the reinvention wave starts growing from an inferior beginning, the continued incremental progression surpasses the performance level of the matured wave. Consequentially, reinvention of the idea by changing the technology core makes the idea bigger. For example, the Television idea has been reinvented several times—pushing this idea at a higher altitude. By the way, the growth of the reinvention wave also forms the dynamics and creative destruction and Disruptive innovation.

Science and precision engineering:

Although economic value creation out of innovation is the subject of study of Economics and Business, ideas for growing big ideas keep flowing from scientific discoveries and their implementation with precision engineering. For example, the idea of turning LED lighting idea to grow needed scientific discoveries to get to know the reason for failing to get blue light. That discovery led to the idea of addressing it with precision engineering. Similarly, the idea of producing lower wavelength light for growing photolithography idea has been flowing from science. But its implementation demands precision engineering. Hence, science and engineering have been at the root of keep making ideas bigger.

Although we all are after big ideas, there are no such things to find anywhere. Instead of laying somewhere, they grow from infancy through a flow of ideas. Hence, if researchers keep searching for them, they will likely fail to find them. Instead of looking for them, we should keep systematically growing infant ideas into big ones. Due to our lack of focus on growing ideas, more than as high as 94 percent of patents do not find application.

Similarly, more than 90 percent of Startups fail. On the other hand, R&D investment has been exponentially growing. To overcome our failure to find big ideas, we should focus on making existing ideas get bigger. Increment and sustaining innovation and reinvention offer the path of growing them bigger. In retrospect, we do not invent big ideas; instead, we grow them layer after layer.  And there is an endless opportunity for growing them.

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