[how can one tell if an idea is any good?] Here’s the simple litmus test: Does your community care? Everyone has a “community” of constituents—customers, users, readers, clients, etc. Share your ideas liberally. If your community engages with them (either for or against them), then you know you’re onto something. If they don’t look twice you know that you either need to reconsider the idea or rethink how you communicate it.

We have to rely both on analysis and synthesis. Analysis—taking complex things and studying and understanding them—is very useful for knowing how well something is going to work and how you might improve it or make it more efficient. It’s not very good for coming up with major new ideas. There we have to be able to synthesize many competing ideas or competing insights—even if those things are in tension—into something that is somehow a whole. What designers and design thinkers are always searching for is the alternative that’s better than the initial starting points.

In most organizations, there’s an incredible amount of talent everywhere, and often that talent is more connected to the marketplace and the world. There’s a clear and real role for senior leadership, but it’s not to have the ideas—it’s to create the framework for the ideas to exist.

There’s another thing that organizations often miss: They assume that the things you go out and study should be the things that are right in the middle of the market, so they talk to customers who are in the middle of the bell curve about the products that the company already makes. That’s usually the least useful form of observation. The most useful is to go and visit with people who are at the ends of the bell curve. “Extreme users” are doing weird and wonderful things that you’ve never imagined, and that’s where you will get interesting ideas. Plus, you shouldn’t just talk to people who are using your product or competing products—talk to people who aren’t. If you ask somebody who already is, the best you’re going to get is incremental improvements of the thing you’ve already got.

One way to stimulate a creative mindset is to avoid the typical focus of organizations on what is and to ask, instead, what if questions. Doing this regularly tests your ability to see things anew.

The important thing is that over time, scientific progress transforms things that used to have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode down to the pattern-recognition space; and from pattern recognition into the rules-based mode. This is the mechanism by which less-trained people are enabled to do more sophisticated things. This is always the way disruption happens. It enables a larger population of less-experienced people to do more sophisticated things.

Of course, innovations are exceptions because the system is built for something else; the system is built for perpetuation, control, and efficiency…To encourage innovation, to create a real constituency for What Could Be, companies need to unleash ideas, passion, and commitment across the company. We have to move from innovations as exceptions; move beyond innovation as a specific role or structure, beyond innovation as a once-in-a-while project, to thinking about innovation as a deep capability.

A new sense of direction doesn't come from a few smart people, who have all been in the company for 20 years, getting together and thinking about it. You have to dramatically increase the strategic variety that's there, create thousands of new ideas out of which you can look for new themes and directions. And then the role of top management is to be the editor. That is, top managers move from being the creators of strategy to searching for the patterns in the streams of ideas that -- in the most innovative companies -- constantly emerge in the organization.

We as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks. This instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new... If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails.

Most organizations have discrete formal groups and processes that use different lenses for evaluating ideas: Marketing represents the customers, finance evaluates the economics, and engineering determines feasibility for launch. They answer the questions in series, and then “throw the problem over the wall” to the next team. They may not even be aware of one another’s findings.

The principles of focused accountability or clear decision rights provide a purported rationale for this fragmented approach. Breaking up the innovation process often seems like the easiest way to make progress. However, it ignores the fact that truly effective innovation needs to integrate choices about customers, finance, and technology; without buy-in at the outset from all these groups, choices made upstream may be undone downstream. When the final decisions about launching the product must be made, the groups often find themselves at cross-purposes; either one group wins and the others lose, or they reach a rapid but weak compromise for the sake of consensus that satisfies nobody, including the customers.

More often than not, the wisest upstream choices are enabled by a timely combination of formal and informal interactions. Right at the start, convene disparate perspectives for rigorous and synchronized debate — a seemingly messy and difficult process that actually makes things easier in the long run. The answers to three major questions should determine whether an idea should be developed or not: (1) will customers want it? (2) can we produce it? and (3) will we be able to make money from it? If you are organizing this process, set up ways to bring the necessary people into one room — or, at least, on one long conference call — to talk through all these questions together. Bring different perspectives to the surface, have productive fights (substantive and candid debates), and come to the best answer. This is the only way to resolve the natural tensions between formal groups without forcing them to compromise. (As management thinkers dating back to Mary Parker Follett have noted, compromise is more likely to water down the result than get the best from conflicting ideas.) When they arrive at joint decisions, different functions feel mutually accountable for results, which inherently improves the chances for success in any process that requires handoffs and coordination later.

Ideas invite others to respond with imaginative gusto. Big imaginative ideas succeed by building on two principles. They are democratic (shared by everybody) and demotic (like art, they convince by being suggestive, not merely by making rational sense). By being evocative rather than explicit, they invite participation.

Facts do not have control of you; your imagination does, and it need have no limits.

To put ideas into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.

As for the genius of innovation, clearly the one percent spark of inspiration is nurtured by a positive culture. But the 99 percent perspiration ingredient comes from employees who love what they do, as well as where they do it, and who invest in that Holy Grail of productivity called “discretionary effort.”

Models and concepts and frameworks are—to use another phrase—mental boxes within which we comprehend the real world. And ever since the 1960s, we have been taught to be creative by “thinking outside the box.”

The trouble is this: once you have mentally stepped outside the box, what happens next? The space outside the box is very expansive—infinitely so—and there can be no guarantee that you will find a solution to your problem. So the answer is that you need to find a new box. And you must consciously build or choose that box yourself; if you do not, an unconscious process will do it for you.

The way we think means that we cannot be creative in a constructive way without inventing models or boxes. Ideally, you need to develop a number of new boxes—new models, new scenarios, new ways of approaching a problem—to structure your thinking. The challenge—and the real art of creativity—is to know how to build those new boxes and, in the process, provide the framework for fresh imaginative effort.

The most surprising thing was that if terrorists rolled a hand grenade down the middle of a room, all our CIA employees would jump out of their seats and throw their bodies on it to protect everyone else. They would all give up their lives for one another and their country. However, if someone ran into the room and said, ‘I need someone to make a decision, but if it’s the wrong one it will be the end of your career, but I need an answer now,’ all of them would run toward the door.

Sitting monarchs don’t usually lead revolutions. Yet most management systems give a disproportionate share of influence over strategy and policy to a small number of senior executives. Ironically, these are the people most vested in the status quo and most likely to defend it. That’s why incumbents often surrender the future to upstarts. The only solution is to develop management systems that redistribute power to those who have most of their emotional equity invested in the future and have the least to lose from change.

We know a lot about how to engender human creativity: Equip people with innovation tools, allow them to set aside time for thinking, destigmatize failure, create opportunities for serendipitous learning, and so on. However, little of this knowledge has infiltrated management systems. Worse, many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. They give a few individuals creative roles and the time to pursue their interests while assuming that most other employees are unimaginative. Tomorrow’s management processes must nurture innovation in every corner of the organization.

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible - by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that you might not otherwise encounter? Creative people let their minds wander, and they mix ideas freely. Innovation often comes from unexpected juxtapositions, from connecting subjects that aren't necessarily related.

Jim March, professor emeritus at Stanford University…pointed out that our understanding of how to manage creativity is impeded by the lack of a theory of novelty, and proposed the beginnings of one. Three conditions seemed to him to be necessary for novelty—slack, hubris, and optimism—which suggest mechanisms that organizations could employ. Slack in an organizational setting means sufficient time and resources for exploration. Increasing hubris means inspiring managers to take risks. Optimism takes hold when a vision of something truly different is made to seem more promising than the status quo.

We came up with five elements that would foster innovation... One, innovation has to start with insights about the customer. Without identifying a need, you can’t come up with new products or processes. Two, great products today have great designs. ...Three, you have to encourage experimentation. You must hire people who don’t listen to you... You have to create a sandbox where people can play—and fail, often and early. The organization must celebrate failure. Four...innovations must add value to the company’s bottom line. Five, you need to have a sales plan. No innovation sells itself; companies have to find ways of packaging and marketing it.

So you need insight, design, experimentation, added value, and sales plans for innovation, and—I love using acronyms—the first letters of those elements spell IDEAS.

If companies genuinely want to move from knowing to doing, they need to build a forgiveness framework – a tolerance for error and failure -- into their culture. A company that wants you to come up with a smart idea, implement that idea quickly, and learn in the process has to be willing to cut you some slack.

Experimental innovators work, pile up evidence and details, and are always reluctant to generalize. They are inductive. They’ll say always, ‘I’m not ready to make a final statement yet’. Cezanne was saying that until the end of his life: “I think I can see the goal, but I’m not sure”. In contrast, conceptual people are deductive. They think much more abstractly. They begin from general principles, and that is the source of their certainty. You can prove deductive propositions, and obviously you can’t prove inductive ones. So it’s that basic difference that accounts for their difference in approach. It’s a different way of thinking, and it leads to very different results.

This goes back to recognizing, individual by individual, what your approach to innovation is, and then designing jobs and the structure of the groups people work in accordingly. In general, you would want to have conceptual people working on their own, potentially with other conceptual people of their own age, whereas with experimental people, especially if they are young, you want them working with other, more experienced experimental workers who can help them learn and gain relevant experience. It’s important to recognize whether someone is experimental or conceptual, because the way to design their jobs differs enormously.

When you step back and look at how innovation produces (or fails to produce) value, you see that people innovating through business models and networking, customer experience, brand and channels tend to get a much higher return on investment than those using what the default choice for most – which is innovating through products, product systems, service and processes. Our instincts, when we are asked to innovate, turn out again and again to be counter-intuitive myths. For instance, we think brainstorming is a good idea; it’s not. We think focusing on new products is a good idea; it’s not.We think that we have to generate hundreds of ideas because of the chronic pattern of failures in ideas, when in fact, value comes from a small number of bold ideas, not a large number of sure-fire winners that we carefully de-risk.

A surprising fact that most leaders don’t know about is that they will get far more innovation return on investment by focusing on non-users of their category, than doing what they instinctively do which is study their most demanding customers and trying to give them ever better service.