I've got an idea, now what do I do?

Anne Miller, director of The Creativity Partnership, advises on how to turn an idea into business success.

The first thing is to check to see if your idea is as good as you think, ideally before you spend a lot of time and money trying to exploit it.

This is important, because the passion that helps our creativity makes it hard to be dispassionate in judging our own ideas. If we're under stress, need a solution to a problem fast or just like being decisive, we may well become too certain, too soon, that our idea is the perfect solution to the world's unmet needs. What's worse, Confirmation Bias means that we tend to ask the questions that will give us the answer we want, rather than risk learning an inconvenient truth.

These tendencies can all be very dangerous to the bank balance!

Checking out your idea

Successful creative entrepreneurs use various techniques to help them find and focus on their best ideas. One useful one is to deliberately generate multiple alternative ideas for a given problem. For example, when I developed the DEX blood glucose meter for Bayer,(aiming to help people with diabetes to test their blood sugar more easily) the winning concept was only one of 12 radically different initial ideas.

This is useful because helps avoid confirmation bias: the questions you ask about one idea may expose the weakness of another, and vice versa, so you can then make a rational choice between them. Even if these are very preliminary concepts, the time invested in creating them pays off many fold, because it gives you much greater certainty that you are heading in the right direction before you start seriously investing in your idea.

Another dangerous psychological tendency is that we tend to overestimate both how common our opinions are and how unique our abilities are.

This means that we need to make sure we're not the only customer for our idea. This may be as simple as using Google to gauge interest or trying it on your family and friends. The founders of Innocent made a batch of drinks and sold them at a small London music festival under a sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?', asking people to throw their empties into either a bin saying 'YES', or a bin saying 'NO'.

Simultaneous invention is surprisingly common because we are not as unique as we like to think: the things that have stimulated us come up with our idea will also have triggered other, equally creative individuals. The moral of this is of course, if you think you have a good idea, don’t hang around.

Don't get demoralised by resistance, get smart

The next problem is that the newer and more significant your idea, the more vigorously the world will ignore it. Remember that this is NORMAL, so don't get demoralised by resistance, get smart.

There are four very different stages of resistance. The initial stages are particularly relevant to creative entrepreneurs.

In the first, people act as if blind. They really genuinely don't see your idea, because it doesn’t seem relevant to the things they are paying attention to, so they filter it out like spam. It's like trying to sell Tampax to men. In the second stage, people seem frozen: they may be aware of your idea but will ignore its importance, just as Kodak did when they ignored the rise of digital photography until nearly too late. It's only when you have broken through these initial stages that people become interested and finally start to integrate your idea into their lives.

This blindness can be useful, as it means that your competitors probably won't initially notice what you're doing. For example, in the late 1980s Cola-Cola executives spent 3 years debating whether to get into "Flavoured Water", but didn't notice the small company "Clearly Canadian" building up sales outlets all around them until too late.

The resistance is more frustrating when you're trying to persuade the world to get interested in your idea.

If you have the courage (and resources) to "go all the way" it is possible to do something so dramatic that the world will sit up and notice. For example in 1897, the inventor and entrepreneur Charles Parsons, gate crashed Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Navy Review with his revolutionary turbine powered ship Turbinia. He outran the patrol boat sent to catch him, nearly sinking a French yacht in the process, but got his first order from the Navy. By 1914, all the Navy's most important ships were powered by his turbines.

An easier tactic is often to recognise that the "obvious" customer for your idea may well be so complacent they will be hard to sell to, so focus on finding and exploiting a new market sector that is hungry for what you can offer. For example, the first real market for the Japanese firm Toray's "carbon fibre" was for making stiff and light golf clubs, rather than the aerospace applications they'd hoped for. They had the humility and flexibility to exploit the unexpected opportunity when it arose, and today have 34% of the global carbon fibre market.

To get your ideas into shape and overcome the four stages of resistance click here and read 'The Myth of the Mousetrap – How to get your ideas adopted (and change the world)' by Anne Miller, published by Cyan/ Marshall Cavendish, ISBN: 978-0-462-09915-6.

Anne Miller is director of The Creativity Partnership, an authority on creativity and innovation and one of the world's most successful female inventors.

© The Creativity Partnership 2008