Ideaflow

Why Creative Businesses Win

By: Jeremy Utley, Perry Klebahn, David Kelley - foreword

Narrated by: Jeremy Utley, Perry Klebahn

Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

The single best way to have a great idea is to produce lots of ideas.

The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. This ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered. Every business problem is an idea problem. How well you can solve those problems is how well you and your business can perform, navigate uncertainty, and develop innovations.

Drawing from their decades of teaching Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives at the world famous Stanford d.school and leading innovative companies like Patagonia, Klebahn and Utley offer a battle-tested framework to exponentially boost your ideaflow. You'll learn how to:

• Establish a brief daily creativity practice
• Develop thousands of great ideas on demand
• Run cheap, fast tests to determine which ideas will work
• Persuade your team and organization on the importance of centering ideaflow

Are you ready to supercharge your organization's creativity?

©2022 Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn (P)2022 Penguin Audio

A great set of steps for creating & curating ideas

The main points of the book are to write down LOTS of ideas, to get inspiration from a variety of sources and to only later curate.

The definition of creativity being about not going with just your first thought. Keep persevering.

They talk about how you'll likely need 100 ideas and probably go through 2,000 variations to get 1 or 2 amazing products for a company.

They suggest spending a few minutes writing down as many ideas as you can, e.g subject lines for an email. No filtering yet, no stopping yourself, just lots of different ideas.
That helps gauge your creativity. Using inspiration from random words or thoughts helps. So does taking a walk, resting or meditating, even having a shower or swim or just reading a book. But you aren't likely to generate ideas if doing Hot activities, ones which are full of stimulation like the latest Netflix show or playing a computer game.
Weeding the garden is much better for IdeaFlow.


They don't just focus on the divergent part, but have a large section of the book dedicated to running experiments and making sure there's a desire for what to build. Check people want it first. Not just asking in a survey but actually running experiments. Seeing if people will add to cart or visit the 4th floor.

The concepts in this book are good. I generated 50 ideas for our start-ups next big product. The only downside is that the authors are sometimes not the best at holding your attention, a little monotonous, mostly in the parts that are basically saying the same thing again. There's also a few minutes where it seemed like the audio editing went skew wiff and merged the wrong takes.
They could maybe remove about 45mins of mostly duplicated stuff without affecting the messaging.

Still, I HIGHLY recommend this book.
I've seen way too many people stick with just the first idea they have and not setup an innovation Pipeline to validate their ideas and be able to have lots of them.