The Innovative Power of Criticism.

Thanks to powerful ideation approaches such as design thinking and crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts, from both insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists. Yet many organizations still struggle to identify and seize big opportunities. That’s because major changes in society and technology fundamentally challenge the conventional understanding of what is valuable, rendering obsolete whatever criteria companies are using to identify customer problems they could address. To see which ideas truly have potential, managers need new assessment criteria. From studying and working with 24 companies that have succeeded in capturing big opportunities, the author has devised a process to create such criteria—one that is rooted not in the art of ideation but in the art of criticism. It engages a company’s own employees and helps them articulate their individual visions. These are then compared and discussed, first in pairs and later in a group, in order to distill them into a handful of even better proposals. The views of outsiders are sought only at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]