Every business is an idea at one point. The idea may be very simple. Do exactly what someone else is doing. Even hire people away from the other operation to run your operation. The market is big enough for both of you to do very well.
Your idea may be to copy what someone else is doing and then to do it at less cost or to offer a lower selling price. Or, you may promote it better. Or, you may add some small wrinkle to the business, bells and whistles, etc.
You may have an original idea like selling insurance over the telephone or selling computers directly (like Dell Computers). Or the new idea may be the product itself.
The business is then set up to work the idea. The more successful the business, the more deeply the idea is entrenched. An example is McDonald's, which is a very successful business.
CREATIVITY
Where then does creativity come in? McDonald's does offer new products from time to time. McDonald's successfully tried the idea of opening in time to offer breakfasts.
So creativity is involved both in finding better ways to deliver the original idea and also in adding new products like new fruit on the same tree. But does McDonald's do any banking? Banking would not fit in with the core concept.
DRIFTING
There are many examples of companies that moved right away from their original concept (such as ITT and the Rank Organisation). This is usually through a process of evolution and drift. There are as many examples of companies which tried to move into different fields and did not succeed.
Virgin, however, is an example of a company which has successfully taken the brand image and the management style into many new fields.
In the days of the conglomerates there was a belief that management excellence could be transferred to any field. This concept was not very successful, possibly because it was badly handled and applied much too widely.
ASSETS
Any successful organisation has both tangible and intangible assets:
* There are production plants
* There are brand images.
* There are distribution networks
* There are skilled people.
* There is technical know-how
* There is market acceptance.
* There are financial reserves
* There are effective managers.
Any idea is a design. A design is a way things are put together to deliver value. An architect who designs a house does not have to work out the tensile strength of the steel beams or the porosity of the roof tiles. These things are known. It is the way known things are put together that forms the design.
BASIC NOTES
All music makes use of the same basic notes. It is the way the same notes are put together that delivers new value. That is what design is all about. If the design process was entirely logical then computers would be writing all the music we needed.
Too many people believe that the analysis of information will yield new ideas. This is not so, because the brain can only see what it is prepared to see. If you analyse information you will see only the existing repertoire of ideas.
To see new ideas you have to prepare them first in your mind. Then you will see them in the data. There are 39,916,800 ways of sequencing just eleven items. So ideas are very unlikely to be produced by exhaustive search. That is where creativity comes in.
ASSET USE
One of the purposes of creativity is to put together existing assets to create new value. Occasionally there may be a need to bring in some outside asset to complete the design.
So where does this sort of thinking take place in an organisation?:
* The marketing people do it to some extent, but with a focus on existing products.
* The research people do it to some extent, but with a focus on technology or data.
* The strategy people do it to some extent, but focus on trends.
Everyone does creative thinking from time to time, but in a somewhat haphazard way. Yet 'ideas' are going to be the most important thing in business in the future because all else will be commodities. Is it enough to just hope that ideas will arise?
Why do corporations not run their own advertising campaigns? Because they realise that the creativity needed in advertising may not be found in-house. They also realise that it would be unlikely that a really creative advertising person would want to work in-house. So there is logic to outsourcing advertising.
There is just as much logic to outsourcing ideation. The difference is that with advertising the people within the organisation do not have much input other than to accept or reject the offered versions.
This is because advertising agencies have successfully convinced them that they know more about advertising than production executives do. This may well be true. With outsourcing ideation there would need to be more of a joint involvement of those within the organisation and the outsource agency.
'MORE IDEAS THAN WE CAN HANDLE'
I often come across organisations that claim to have all the ideas they need. Indeed, they have more ideas than they can handle. You can still have too many ideas but no good ones. My experience has shown that such claims are false and demonstrate a failure to understand the role of ideas.
CONSORTIUM
To provide one 'outsource' for ideas I am setting up a consortium with Ernst & Young on the one hand and Saatchi & Saatchi on the other. Ernst & Young provides creativity and implementation. Saatchi provides creativity and communication. My role is creativity and methodology. The consortium would work with clients to develop new ideas that build on existing assets.
IMPLEMENTATION
An idea without implementation is not worth much. But implementation without ideas is worth even less. Competence is only of value when attached to an idea. An unused idea remains full of potential.
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