Six Tools for Turning Your Ideas into Reality
From finding the right analogy to tapping into FOMO, learn how to sell your ideas to potential supporters.
Innovation is built on great ideas, usually about solving a customer need. Successful innovation, the sort that makes fortunes and sometimes change lives, is also built on financial and other kinds of support to implement those ideas. For a brilliant innovator like Nikola Tesla, getting that support might be the harder part. We call this the innovator’s paradox: the more novel, radical or risky the idea, the harder it is to acquire the necessary resources. The good news is, you do not need to be a born salesperson to overcome that barrier.
My co-authors* and I conducted over 100 interviews with innovative leaders including Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe), Indra Nooyi (PepsiCo), Mark Parker (Nike) and Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn), and drew on multiple case studies to distil the tools and practices that helped them convince backers, customers, employees and endorsers. As described in detail in this MIT Sloan Management Review article, the tools and practices create what we call impression amplifiers that generate attention and credibility for yourself and your ideas.
>> Supplementary review article that may interest you: 14 Ways To Get Breakthrough Ideas > This article may interest your further reading: Why Do Great Ideas Fail? <<
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Check out the video below to discover 'Where Do Great Ideas Come From?' by our very own CEO of Leaderonomics Group:
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Functional
Tags: Growth, Succession Planning, Self-Agency, Abundance Mindset, Self-regulation
References:
- Bizarre imagery as an effective memory aid: The importance of distinctiveness (A research paper by Mark A. McDaniel & Gilles D. Einstein https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/1986-13677-001)
- Better Together? Signaling Interactions in New Venture Pursuit of Initial External Capital (A journal article by Lawrence A. Plummer, Thomas H. Allison & Brian L. Connelly https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/amj.2013.0100)
- 4 Ways to Use Scarcity to Persuade and Influence (An article by Jeremy Nicholson https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/persuasion-bias-and-choice/201812/4-ways-use-scarcity-persuade-and-influence)
Nathan Furr is an Associate Professor of Strategy at INSEAD. He is a Programme Director of Leading Digital Transformation and Innovation, Innovation in the Age of Disruption and Building Digital Partnerships and Ecosystems, Executive Education programmes at INSEAD, and author of three best-selling books published by Harvard Press: The Innovator’s Method, Leading Transformation and Innovation Capital. Read more.
