Little Ideas Are The Pathway To Big Sucess

Big Ideas (Meatball Mondae 11) via Seth's Blog 12/3/07 gives me an excuse to bring up another article that I posted but never dealt with to the extent that I wanted.

Seth points out that in a factory-based organization, "little ideas are the key to success".

"Small improvements in efficiency or design can improve productivity and make a product just a bit more appealing. New Marketing, which exists in the noisy marketplace, demands something bigger. It demands ideas that force people to sit up and take notice."

"Today, the advertiser's big idea doesn't travel very well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is pushed deeper into the organization. Let the brilliant ad guys hang out with your R&D team and watch what happens. Yes, there are big ideas. They're just not advertising-based."

This is a pretty profound statement from a marketer. He does not say it explicitly, but the noisy marketplace of New Marketing seems to break out of the Henry Ford industrial assembly model. Regardless, it involves innovation and Seth is asserting that innovation belongs in all components of the organization at a fundamentally deep level. The whole Seth Godin meatball series is here.

This supporting article from the Christian Science Monitor is on, "How companies can encourage innovation."

"We're moving from an industrial economy to a creative economy," says Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Creative Class,"

In a new survey, the Innovation Institute, "finds a "creativity gap" in the workplace – a disparity between the creative resources available and those being used. While a vast majority of American workers (88 percent) consider themselves creative, fewer than 2 in 3 think they are tapping their creative capacities on the job. Nearly 30 percent say they would take a lower salary to work for a company that valued their creative input. And 1 in 5 say they would move to a different city to work for such a company."

Two other factors – a rise in entrepreneurship and more women in business – also promote innovation, says Vicki Donlan, author of "Her Turn: Why It's Time for Women to Lead in America." Many women tell her they left a corporate job because they lacked opportunities to use their creativity.