Imagine a great idea pops up in your company’s idea management system, in a brainstorm or over a beer after work. The first thing a manager will typically do is calculate the cost of implementing said idea. This cost will then be balanced against the value potential of the idea – usually additional income from increased sales or reduced operational costs. However, the more creative an idea is (and hence potentially innovative), the harder it can be to determine the value especially in monetary terms. As a result, many potentially very exciting ideas are not implemented simply because a manager has decided that to do so would be to costly.
While such managers can be very good at working out the cost of implementing an idea, they often fail completely to calculate the cost of not implementing an idea – and this can sometimes be far more expensive than implementing it, especially over the long term.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Report 103: Your journal on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business
