How to Spot a Great Idea – What to Look For

Introduction: How to Spot a Great Idea – What to Look For

One of things that I have said time-and-time again, is that when you are reading a book, you should take detailed notes, and pick out five big ideas. After you have done that, you should connect the fives big ideas from the different books you read to cross-pollinate, creating hybrid ideas. It takes only one good idea to transform your life. I officially started the Strategic Reading Challenge at the beginning of January 2016, but the event is structured so that anyone can join at any time. I created tools to help participants connect their five big ideas from all the books they read each month.

But what if people do not know what makes an idea great? What are the elements of a great idea? Before the Strategic Reading Challenge started, I wrote the blog post, “What Makes an Idea Great?” Now looking at the blog post objectively a few weeks later, I have to say that it completely misses the mark. If someone is actively participating in the reading challenge, and wants to pick out the five big ideas from a book, they would be unable to do so after reading “What Makes an Idea Great”, especially if he or she doesn’t know what a great idea looks like.

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I decided to conduct research to get the answer to, “How to spot a great idea.” It seems simple enough, but it wasn’t. I went to the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, and I had a hard time getting the answer to my question. There are tons of articles on creative thinking, creative ideas and innovation – not exactly what I’m after. This makes me realize that I may have to write a series of articles to get to a workable answer.

For years now, whenever I read a book, even fiction, I would extract five big ideas from the book. More recently, since I started the Strategic Reading Challenge, I realized that after all these years, I was placing the cart before the horse. What I should have been doing instead, was to review my detailed notes on the book, then extract the five ideas. When I am extracting the five big ideas, I do not use a specific process, I just go with my intuition, but is that the best way to do things? If someone asked me to explain how I decided which idea was great, I would have a difficult time doing so. The ideas are often really great ideas, but I cannot say how I got to the finish line.

This is very important to me, because ideally, I would like my Strategic Reading Challenge participants to profit from reading books. They are investing a lot of time reading books, and many of the books they read can positively impact their careers. They are investing time to read five books each month. The most successful people typically devour about 60 books each year.

Challenge participants are updating and learning new skills, and solving problems they and others encounter in the workplace. They are developing cultural awareness that’s useful in a diverse workplace. If they solve problems that matter in the workplace, others will welcome the solution. When I use the word profit in the context of reading books, it could mean profiting financially, or profiting by becoming more valuable in the workplace.

What to Look for in a Great Idea

After reading through some of the research literature on ideas, my understanding is that a great idea is a solution to a problem that’s worth solving. It’s a solution that will delight your users. Will people appreciate the effort it will take to develop the idea? To answer this, the literature recommends that you create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to implement a product or service with the idea that this is a continuous cycle in which you have to build, then measure to learn.

This sounds like a lot of work. If you participated in the Strategic Reading Challenge, knowing that you can profit from your knowledge if you choose the right books to read, would you be willing to invest the time to unpack potential great ideas? I would, because I know that one idea has the potential to transform my life, if I take the time to develop and implement it.

During my exploration of how to spot a great idea, I also asked myself, “What are the elements of a great idea?” I found this on Quora.

Question: What are the basic elements of a good business idea? How can you tell if this is worth your blood, sweat and tears?

“A good business idea (vs a good idea) is one that will actually make money, e.g. someone will pay you for your solution.” Michael Bittle

“I always start with three questions and then constantly validate them:

1. What is that pain? (The problem that my solution will solve, and what is the disruptive event causing the need?)

2. How is my solution unique? (Can I protect with barriers to entry for others?)

3. Can I make money out of it? (Will people buy and will they buy now?)” Allan Wilson

I have curated the responses from Quora, so please visit the site to read all the answers.

To make sense of all of this, I have to go back to why I created the Strategic Reading Challenge in the first place. First, I am concerned with the level of violence in the world, and believe that if people were more culturally aware, we wouldn’t have half the problems we do today. Second, a staggering number of jobs are lost to robots annually and the pace of automation is accelerating.

So, I want people to develop career resilience, and they can do that by upskilling and acquiring information, that if used, can make them become more valuable to themselves, to their clients and to their employers. Additionally, the World Economic Forum reports that you need to learn 10 skills to thrive by 2020. Learning those skills is built into the reading challenge.

You are more likely to profit from your great idea, if you understand your industry, and know which problems are worth solving. Also, what important issues do you see others struggling with? The answers to these questions will give you insights into the kinds of books you should be reading during the challenge. There is a lot of flexibility with the elements of the Strategic Reading Challenge, so you will be able to read the books that are right for you.

So when you are reading a book, is there information that you can use to help solve one of the important problems you are trying to solve? That piece of information is a great idea. If you are reading the right books during the Strategic Reading Challenge, chances are likely that you would be able to find five great ideas. Chances are you’ll be unable to use the big ideas as they are, you’ll have to refine them. If the great ideas you extracted from a book could be implemented as is, someone would have done it already. Connecting the ideas from the books that you read, letting the ideas cross-pollinate, is where you will start to reap the benefits.

How to Spot a Great Idea

1. Why are you reading the book in the first place?
2. What problem are you trying to solve?
3. What information are you trying to acquire?
4. Is this something that I am interested in, or would other people be interested in the information as well?

When you find the information in the book, that’s your great idea. I am a lot closer to figuring out how to identify a great idea. Perhaps the next installment in the series would be how to properly use the tools I created to use while on the Strategic Reading Challenge. Or perhaps it could be drilling down further into spotting a great idea. I wanted to add that a Nobel Prize  recipient says that if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you have to do work that matters. It cannot just be about you, others have to benefit from your great idea.

Join the Strategic Reading Challenge to learn key skills needed for future jobs and to develop the cultural intelligence needed to survive and thrive in today's global workplace.

Sources Referenced/Cited

Quora

Wright, Geoffrey A., Paul Skaggs, and Richard E. West. “Teaching innovation in high school technology classes: innovation is a messy process and consequently should not be taught through a restrictive linear approach.” Technology and Engineering Teacher Dec. 2012: 18+. Academic OneFile. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

“Where good ideas come from.” Online Searcher May-June 2015: 74+. Academic OneFile. Web. 3 Feb. 2016.

First Published February 2016