The Power of Killing Ideas

I pride myself on being an "idea guy." I often contemplate changing things that are working, just for the sake of breaking things. My years working in startups is likely the reason why I love being in this space. In these companies, there was no roadmap, especially during the first dot-com boom. No one ever did streaming video on a mobile phone before, so we were trailblazing on the product, but also organization. 

In my last year at Razorfish, I helped to build something called Proto, which was a play on the word prototype. It was an "innovation as a service" offering. We'd bring this offering to clients challenged with innovation. They weren't sure where to start, how to start, or even what process to follow. They've read the latest articles on lean startup or agile methodologies or saw the most recent unicorn news on a startup that just disrupted X or Y. Maybe they even caught a glimpse of Salim Ismael's talk about Exponential Organizations and were like "now what?" 

So like all good consulting companies, we attempted to fill the gap. At first, we realized that the requests were more for an event aka "Hackathon" because that was what others were doing. Soon we figured out that is more about developing new programs, products, and lines of services than hosting an event. We would never get there with a 24-hour event where sleep-deprived developers, designers, and strategists would provide an MVP. That could be a goal, but we needed to define the path first. 

We found there was no absence of ideas. In fact, everyone had ideas. Ideas are everywhere in an organization from the CEO to front-line employees. In fact, some of the biggest game-changing ideas come from within the organization. But this is not a post on democratizing your idea generation (which is a good idea, think Kodak), but a post on what to do with all these ideas. How do you pick the RIGHT ones? More importantly, how do organizations eliminate the WRONG things? Well, we had an idea at Proto, and in the spirit of Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, we decided to Race WITH the Machines. 

There's a small group of super smart data scientists located in Portland in a company called Growth Sciences. They came up with a plan on how to de-risk the choices companies make when investing in a product or new service. At the center of their process is the MESE or Market Exaptation Simulation Engine (yea, say that three times fast). In simple terms, it's a proprietary system that uses real-time data and pattern recognition to model businesses in their market. It allows companies to assess the statistical likelihood of new product launches, acquisitions, and other investment activities. I call it the IDEA KILLER. 

If you strip down the fancy words and data jargon, you find at the core the system tells you whether or not that idea just brought to you by your head of design, recent Harvard MBA, or even your trusted head of strategy is a good or bad idea. By using data science, you can premortem ideas before they even get to an MVP. Well, it's not that linear, but for storytelling, it works. In fact, their model predicted that Nike's Fuel Band would be a consumer success. It also predicted that Nike would retire it if it stayed within the walls of Nike. Here's what happened. 

What if you can have ideas generated from every cubicle, workstation, field office, and retail store within your organization? What if you could take those ideas and filter them through a system, using data science and modeling, to essentially kill the bad ideas. The ideas that come out of the other side are likely to be the best, right? 

On their site, Growth Science exclaims that an estimated 70-90% of corporate growth efforts typically fail. 90%! 9 out of 10 growth efforts fail! 

While you don't want to be the idea killer, you do want to premortem ideas allowing the best ideas to flow through the process. This allows your executives to quantify decisions better and manage risk to deliver results faster and more consistently than your competitors.