Waste always bothers me. I am sure it does to many of you as
well. What are the common wastages you
can think of? Close your eyes and think
of wastes that really bother you and what you can do about it?
The above will be common thoughts that more than 80% of us
will come up with! I am sure some of
you thought of Money when thinking of waste as well. Did you come up with some other “thought” when
thinking about waste? Do let me know in
the comments below what are the other wastes that bother you and more
importantly what are you doing to address the waste or prevent it?
My area of concern about Waste might surprise many of
you. Have you ever thought of wasted
idea? What is wasted idea anyway? Wasted idea is an idea which did not really
see light of the day just because it was not articulated properly, it did not
get a supporter or sponsor for it, maybe it was just way before its time or
some other reason. For many of you who
have been in computer industry for long time, you have seen that AI was talked
about even 20 years back, lots of research work and concrete algorithms were
developed many many years ago and if that was the case – why we did not doing
smart things that we do with AI few years back?
IMHO there was a crucial piece of the puzzle that was blocker was the
compute power and storage. Don’t you
believe me? Read the following article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence
Now with the easy availability of compute and storage power
, AI is seeing new usecases and today its used in many many extra ordinary ways
but imagine if that had not happen? AI
would have been such a big wasted effort!
A good idea which has potential did not make it just because it was
before its time. Simple isn’t it? So what can we do about it ? Or should we do anything about it at
all? I am for sure on a journey to
eliminate as much waste as possible from the various innovation activities that
we do within the organization. Do you do
innovation activities in your organization?
What do you do with the things that you generate/create after activity
is done? My common observation from being part of such
activities in my organization as well as interviewing several people who are
associated with innovation is , we have not quiet cracked the problem of how to
identify the idea which is a total “junk” idea v/s the idea that might need
some more thought before we can make decision on it. It’s the latter category of idea that I call
the wasted idea as more often than not, after the innovation activity is done,
these ideas are shelved and no one looks at them again. Should we be doing things differently? How do we give second chance to these
ideas? Look at potential of merging of one
or more ideas and creating a new idea altogether? If
this idea is real for you and you are interested in solving the problem with
me! Please do reach out to me and we will find out ways and means to help each
other out!
Image source:
The use of AI to review the rejected ideas is definitely worth evaluating
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Like they say, there is no such thing like a dumb idea. Every idea is important and can be a crucial piece in the bigger picture.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest waste in my view is waste of time.Every one in the chain.. be it and idea submitter, coach, elevator and sponsor has spent time and energy in the innovation cycle. If an idea is called junked it should have a documented reason. IMHO just having a repository of great ideas is not sufficient, we should also include in database the so called "Junk" ideas and the reason why they were termed as not feasible. More learning can happen from failures than from success. Who knows, when the time is right junk can become gold.
ReplyDeleteGood take to connect it with waste we see in our daily life. Agree, no one thinks about idea waste. It is high time to do something about it.
ReplyDeleteI liked the way you have introduced this topic. Wasting an idea is probably a wasted opportunity which cannot really be specified in $ terms (since we cannot really predict the potential). It is about time we plugged this leak and brought about a paradigm shift in our thinking.
ReplyDelete