Idea Execution
Idea Execution
Ideas are abstractions. Manifesting them against real political, financial, and technical constraints is a different and rarer skill — one that “no theory or book or degree can ever grant you,” in Scott Berkun’s formulation.
The Myths of Innovation centers this argument: the innovation epiphany is a myth. What looks like a breakthrough is almost always a long sequence of unglamorous work. Ted Hoff, inventor of the first microprocessor, put it directly: “If you’re always waiting for that wonderful breakthrough, it’s probably never going to happen. Instead, what you have to do is keep working on things. If you find something that looks good, follow through with it.”
The distinction between idea and execution:
- An idea requires only the mental act of connection — it is cheap, fragile, and cannot succeed on its own.
- Execution requires facing the actual constraints: budget politics, organizational resistance, technical limits, and Idea Killers (the thoughtless rejection phrases that kill nascent ideas before they are tested).
- “What matters is the ability to see a problem clearly, combined with the talent to solve it. Both of those tasks are generally defined, however unglamorously, as work.”
Problem Finding is the upstream discipline — getting the definition right so the execution problem is tractable. Brainstorming (correctly applied per Osborn’s method) is one tool for generating candidate ideas before execution narrows the field.