Prune Your Ideas

Research from Stanford University suggests that it takes about 2,000 ideas to create a commercially successful new product or service. You read that right: 2,000.

It’s an intimidating figure no matter how you look at it, and the prospect of coming up with thousands from the get-go is almost paralyzing. One of the most common responses to the volume required to get a good idea is, “So am I supposed to drop everything and come up with 2,000 ideas before doing anything else?”

I find it’s helpful to think not just of volume, but also velocity. Flow is as critical an aspect of ideaflow as ideas are. Your flow rate is largely a function of your rate of experimentation. Which is to say, the way to move forward isn’t to generate thousands of ideas before doing anything else — which would merely result in an “ideadam” — but to have an instinct towards moving things forward in a rapid manner.

The goal is to create ideaflow — not an idea pond. Movement matters.

One way to increase flow is through scrappier experimentation. Another is through ruthless elimination.

It’s counterintuitive, but killing ideas is essential to the creative process. Killing ideas frees up resources and attention that could be directed elsewhere. My friend and colleague Bob Sutton shared this anecdote on his blog: “Steve Jobs advised (a team of senior executives) that killing bad ideas isn’t that hard — lots of companies, even bad companies, are good at that. Jobs' argument went something like this: ‘What is really hard — and a hallmark of great companies — is that they kill a lot of good ideas.’” Jobs reportedly told Nike’s then-CEO Mark Parker, “Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things. You have to pick carefully.”

Case in point: KilledbyGoogle.com lists over 260 products that the search giant has axed. The reality is that every product that gets killed frees up precious resources for forward-looking exploration.

We have a ready-made metaphor in nature: pruning a tree. Pruning encourages healthy growth, increases circulation, and maximizes vigor.

My friend Leidy Klotz has demonstrated that while it’s much harder for us to remove something we’ve already begun, sometimes subtraction is actually the best way to solve a problem. The same is true for the problem of innovation. To feed the flow, make peace with ideas that are past their prime (note: do harvest experimental learnings) — yes, prune them — and move forward.

Related: Have Lots of Ideas
Related: Measure Your Ideaflow
Related: Make Experiments Cheaper
Related: Add Subtraction
Related: Reflect on Experiments
Related: The Dynamic Duo: Ideas and Experiments

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