Don’t Leave Your Best Ideas on The Backburner

Photo by Gerrie van der Walt, Unsplash

Futures and innovation teams are drowning in ideas.

Coming up with ideas is easy. But finding the resources to nurture all those ideas? That’s hard.

I had a conversation with a client last week and we talked about how futures and innovation teams are resource constrained, but their ability to generate interesting ideas worthy of exploration isn’t.

They also raised a really interesting idea that I’ve never thought about before:

What would it look like if someone external managed the initial development of some of these innovation concepts for us?

I’d honestly never thought about this before, but it makes a lot of sense.

It’s an innovative way of thinking about how to nurture and build a case for innovation concepts that more companies should be thinking about. Here’s why:

Escaping the Tyranny of Immediacy

Teams leave great ideas they love on the backburner - either because the ideas are too future-focused, or because easier wins demand attention first. The tension in futures and innovation work is that your mandate is future-focused, but you still need to make an impact in the present. This naturally incentivises focus on the things that are closer in, at the expense of ideas that are further out.

It’s not that those backburner concepts are bad, it’s just that teams tend not to get to them because of the tyranny of immediacy.

Why not hand those concepts off to someone who can get you closer to a business case? Those innovative ideas will be easier to make the case for internally once they’re of a higher fidelity. Then your team can really sink their teeth in.

New & Unburdened Perspectives

Even with smart, diverse teams, turning some ideas into a solid business case will require experience not every team has. Concept exploration will naturally take your team out of places they are familiar with because lateral exploration is the name of the game.

Externalizing some concepts allows you to hand them off to people with specialized backgrounds or experience who can build a strong foundation for your team to build from once you’re ready to bring them back internally. The foresight world, for example, is filled with people who have interesting hybrid backgrounds that make them uniquely qualified to explore innovation concepts.

Those same external folks also have the advantage of cognitive distance from the inner-workings of your organization, meaning they’re less likely to prematurely constrain their thinking.

Multiplier Effect

Especially compared to increasing your team’s headcount, or commissioning an expensive exploration with an agency, an external concept manager would be a cost-effective way of quickly multiplying the volume of concepts your team is able to explore.

It provides greater capacity to explore the further out future, without derailing the important work that needs to happen to serve the more immediate needs that will always come your way.

An external expert could run a focused sprint over a couple of weeks without needing to worry about the computing pressures inside your business.

The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a great idea, and one that more teams should be thinking about if they want to make sure some of their favourite ideas don’t languish on the backburner while they tackle the day to day challenges that come at them.

Instead of letting your more future-oriented ideas wither on the vine, why not engage an external concept manager?

If this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to chat.