What makes an idea good is its being more good than an idea that is less good this is not to say that one idea is “better” than another but rather more good and it’s hard to argue with more compared with less unless it’s more of something bad as for example more oil spills [...]
The Kindling Blog
Part V: What Makes an Idea Good?
Part IV: What Makes an Idea Good?
I’m going to make a confession: I hate handing out advice on how to be better at pretty much anything. There’s an entire industry built around sharing the best kept secrets on how you can innovate or how you can capitalize on the Next Great Business Idea. For me, it’s almost like picking up a [...]
Part III: What Makes an Idea Good?
Rules are good (though it hurts me to say it). As a designer and concept developer, I thrive on open-ended thinking and constant “what if?” scenarios. Constraints should be tested, assumptions should be challenged and no idea is a dumb idea, right? There are countless approaches to innovation, but the most successful involve some level [...]
Part II: What Makes an Idea Good?
The most interesting part of most Kindling product conversations is often the discussion around idea moderation, specifically how decision-makers of an organization can find the best ideas. This, of course, touches on the question of the day: what makes an idea good? Kindling features a voting system, and other competing products feature similar schemes for [...]
Part I: What Makes an Idea Good?
There are no good idea guarantees. Set up guidelines, encourage themed idea-drives, do whatever kind of marketing you want for good ideas. But you’ll never be 100% in the realm of goodness. (And who would want to be? Bad ideas provide the most fertile ground for better ones.) What I want to write about here [...]
Welcome Back!
After a year-long hiatus from this Blog, I’m happy to announce that we’re back and better than ever. Why the hiatus, and more importantly, why the return? Well it’s been said so many times at this point that assigning authorship to this idea would be nearly impossible, but I’ll credit Seth Godin when he said [...]
The Case For Liberal Arts
I played the violin for 10 years while I was growing up. I wasn’t very good; I never aspired to be the next soloist or Julliard applicant. But I often think about the things we learned in that class, life lessons that have stuck with me. For example, our Hungarian director once told us about [...]
Organizational Bottlenecks
Great blog post by Scott Berkun pointing out a common flaw in how organizations approach idea management – by focusing too much on idea cultivation and not on the idea selection process. Scott says: The reason there is little change is that idea inputs were never the problem. The bottleneck was further upstream. Crowdsourcing, brainstorming, [...]
Storytelling for Kindling
When Rich presented Kindling to about 700 people at the NY Tech Meet-up on Monday evening, we had a group of about 10 Arc-ers representing a cheering section. Seeing our app on the big screen (aside several other talented technologists’ work) was as exciting and nerve-wracking as one might expect. Perhaps the best thing about [...]
Iconic Collaboration
Human history is full of moments of individual inspiration – think Einstein’s Relativity – but what about examples of successful group collaboration around an idea? A few hundred years ago, a particular group of backwoods provincials gave birth to perhaps the best idea of all – a limited republican government designed to protect against tyranny. [...]
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