Often people in organizations ask the question, “What factors lead to good ideas in innovation projects?” Basically, there are many known influencing factors here. Starting with the willingness of the people to change, the competence of the right helping tools and the availability of the appropriate time and space, many things can be mentioned here.
But if we had to favor one factor, it would certainly be the “amount of paper.” Yes – you read that right, it’s about the amount of paper produced, for example brownpapers with hundreds and hundreds of post-its with preliminary ideas and sketches on them. We have to produce many more ideas than we later implement. “On normal days, I design over 500 ideas on paper, and if I’m lucky, one remains,” Karl Lagerfeld said in an interview.
We humans are eye and hand creatures, Leonardo da Vinci already spoke about this. Working in a tangible and visual way corresponds to our nature. We can already see this in children playing with Lego – the more building blocks, the better. This is also the case in innovation projects.
The greater the amount of produced paper that adorns the walls and tables in an innovation room, the better the ideas become over time. Automatically, for example, we start to combine the many individual ideas after a while, just as we did when playing with Legos.
As the amount of ideas on paper increases, so does the confidence in one’s own and also team creativity. As the amount of paper increases, so does the creative spirit.
Looking at many years and projects, it can be clearly said that the teams that essentially work visually and analogously and with large volumes of ideas are the much more successful in innovating. With such teams, significant innovation successes often occur in the second year of innovation work.
