I’ll never forget the first time I realized the benefits of early-stage failures. It was the early days of my tenure leading executive education at the d.school, and we were doing a quick post-training follow-up at the headquarters of a large financial institution on the east coast. When we asked folks to share the impact of our program on their work, one participant stood up and said, “We delivered over $700,000 in value to the organization in the last three weeks.”

That was beyond my expectations. How did she sell so much new product in such a short time?

“No. We didn’t sell a new product. We decided to kill a direction for which we had already been given funding. Our early tests over the last couple of weeks gave us conviction that the greenlit direction was entirely the wrong path to take. So we gave the money back.

“… that counts, right?”

Totally. Little did I appreciate how much impact can come from a decision to NOT pursue a direction. We spend so much time talking about the merits of new ideas, and the potential gains associated with them, that it’s easy to forget the impact of the conviction to NOT do something.

As another innovation leader told me, “We provide elimination of ideas as a service (EOIAAS doesn’t have quite the same ring as SAAS but it’s close). At least half of the value we provide to the organization is in killing ideas that most assume are great.”

My feeling is that those points belong on the scoreboard every bit as much as the data that suggests “success.” But here’s the rub. As another leader said, “Senior executives often bring us their their ‘billion dollar post it,’ and most of the time, when we get down to really testing it in market, it’s just not a good idea. We do our diligence, save them a lot of money, etc, and tell them. They totally get it, and agree, but the problem is, they don’t have another post it. That was the one idea they had.”

The cost of a bad idea is very little. But the cost of having no more ideas is quite high. Keep the funnel full with an idea quota. And if that’s tough, then just flip one problem.

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