When you talk to people about innovation, the conversation has a habit of always drifting to ideas, developing ideas and the search for the ‘big idea’. The idea that will make them rich, bust up the competition and rearrange the market as we know it.

Within many of the large corporates ‘innovation’ invariably ends up being a workshop, an idea-fest, an activity designed to make people feel good and keep them enthused.

Now none of this is necessarily wrong or bad. But we often feel that it’s sort of missing the point. We have always pushed the notion that coming up with ideas is easy if you have the right brief, the right fuel, the right input.

So with this in mind it was interesting to read a recent article by Malcolm Gladwell (of Blink and The Tipping Point fame) that appeared in the New Yorker in early May.

If you have an interest in innovation, serendipity and the development of ideas it is a corker. Apart from being a fine writer, the article touches on our hypothesis that ideas are everywhere. It also gives play to the notion that developing ideas is actually easy, once you’ve done the leg work. This is a pet theory of ours, so it was refreshing to see it so clearly articulated by Gladwell.

However, the really fascinating part of the article relates to a chap called Nathan Myhrvold, who set up Microsoft’s research division and who cashed out in 1999. Myhrvold has since gone on to start a company called Intellectual Ventures. And boy, what a company!

IV’s sole purpose is to come up with ideas. But what makes it fascinating is how they do this. In a nut shell, they seed their team with the right fuel to produce breakthrough and disruptive ideas.

Does this approach work? Well their initial expectation was to file a hundred patents a year. They are currently filing 500 a year, with a backlog of 3000 ideas. And to add some real world context to this, they recently licensed off a cluster of these ideas for $80 million.

It would seem that the big idea, is not coming up with ideas, it’s how you do it that counts.

Michael R Johnson