“The man with a new idea is a crank… until it succeeds” – Mark Twain
A wise man once told me that there is a high price to new ideas. I thought he was talking about venture capital! No, he was talking about the cost of innovation. It takes great balls of fire to innovate, when it’s easier to do what we have always done in order to succeed. True innovation is the riskiest risk there is, to use terrible English, because when you are ‘out there’ in the deepest depths (there I go again) of the blue ocean, there is nothing to hold on to. I am not talking about your small and slow gradual innovations, I am talking about innovations that change things. The punctuations, the extended uncut directors editions that remodel the ending so it’s new. I am in a metaphorical mindset at the moment, I should pen a Tom Peters’ guru book … I might just sell two copies. I have a self-created reference for describing this process I call it: Engaging Concepts. It’s the forefront of innovation, the grey bits inbetween the new stuff where thought and reality congeal for the first time. It’s a bloody scary place, with very little predictability or repeatability.
The high price of new ideas
New ideas come with a price. There is adjustment period, rejection or acceptance but there is also a chance for improvement. There are a few people I know who I would put in the Mark Twain category. These are people I like to call thought innovators. You don’t find their papers in the Academy of Management Review, or Management Information Systems Quarterly, no you find them in a shed, outside or putting out their radical ideas into the community somewhere else. It’s as if people who are thought leaders get punished until enough people come around. Does this make them special? No, it does not. It does make them worth listening to, if you can filter out the strange things they say and the weirdness of their lives.
So where does the cost come in?
The cost comes in when we realise the risk. Risk management is all about minimising or eliminating risk, it’s not really about innovation. You have to take tremendous risks sometimes to innovate. You have to say, ‘to hell with this we have to try it and see what happens – we can’t know the variables in this case’. I think most of the great innovations were risky and may have even failed. You know what? They did it. They paid the high price of risk of catastrophic failure and now life is better… in short!
New ideas are often risky, sometimes stupid and other times downright crazy… and there is that. However, as Twain noticed the title of ‘crank’ and ‘genuis’ are one good idea away!
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There are other ways in which the cost of new ideas can be `high`. Robert Pirsig (`Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance` and `Lila`), in presenting his Metaphysics of Quality`, discusses the risk of stepping off the precipice of conventional knowledge.
In `Dancing Wu Li Masters“ Gary Zukov (in discussing Albert Einstein), notes that Einstein publishing his theory of light as being `quantized` and, therefore, having a particle-type nature did so in full knowledge that conventional scientific wisdom at that time was that light had a wave-like nature. Napoleon Hill spent approximately 25 years undertaking research in developing his personal philosophy of success (or achievement) as presented in `Think and Grow Rich` and its companion `Law of Sucess`, the whole time ridiculed by his family and friends. Marconi`s friends attempted to have him commited to an institution for pursuing his ideas that words could be transmitted `through the ether` (i.e. the radio).
What ideas do we individually suppress because we fear criticism, let alone ridicule or institutionalization! By challenging our paradigms, we risk making great discoveries and having wonderful insights.
Well said Rick.
Thanks for the comment. You hear that most people who come up with new ideas are on the borderline of sane and crazy … yet we need what I call an ‘innovation capacity’. Having the courage to create innovative decisions and the capacity to support them. Most instutions do not have ‘innovation capacity’. They spend no time building it, but instead maintain status quo… this is why the ‘googles’ of the world dominate, even though they are too now getting stuck IMHO.
Thanks Rick!
Luke,
What can I say or add? Repeating some of Luke’s observations, although resembling in a sense a wise parrot is not a bad policy always.- “New ideas are often risky, sometimes stupid and other times downright crazy…and there is that. However, as twain noticed the title of ‘crank’ and ‘genius’ are one good idea away!
Mike,
Thanks for that… you always have something good to say
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