What Price Innovation?

What would you be willing to spend to unearth a billion-dollar idea from your organization? A hundred thousand? A million? Nothing?

Why are you looking at revenues at all?

Unless you have a true Silicon Valley mindset, that question is wrong in so many ways. I’ve posted before on how many executives feel that an idea is not innovative unless it makes a billion dollars (everyone loves a unicorn), so anything less than that is not worth working on.

Firstly, if Silicon Valley startups have taught us anything it’s that the driver of your innovation efforts shouldn’t be cash (although increasingly this is what people think success should be in Silicon Valley), but a product or service which massively improves people’s lives. The billion, or multi-billion, or even million-dollar payoff is a side effect — change people’s lives for the better — and the money will follow.

So, how much would you pay to unearth a billion-dollar innovation, lurking somewhere deep in your organization? You know it’s out there, somewhere among your own employees, just waiting for the right spark to let it loose. The billion dollars itself seems like a great incentive to me, but in addition to that, you can generate multiple billion-dollar businesses, multiple million-dollar businesses, and process improvements which can save millions to billions of dollars…