Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

Chapter 9

Reign in the Tyranny of Ideas

I’m the decider, and I decide what is best.

—G. W. Bush

Ninety percent of [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.

—Theodore Sturgeon

There is one problem with everything we have told you so far. If you succeed, you will find yourself with many, many ideas or proposals or even prototypes. We have taken to calling it the tyranny of ideas.

Organizational decision-making has not lacked approaches to selecting the best ideas; methods like SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), cost–benefit analysis, or decision tree analysis might all sound familiar. But the output from crowdstorming is at a scale that these approaches never anticipated. Our concern, then, is not to review all decision-making frameworks, but simply to highlight what appears to be working best when dealing with large numbers of ideas.

When Ideas Can Be Tested

Among the things we emphasized when asking for ideas was to make sure you knew how complete you wanted the answer to be. In other words—are you looking for a sketch on the back of a napkin, or a fully functioning business (or any number of stages in between)? When submissions take the form of working prototypes, you can directly measure the proposals’ merit to find the best—whatever it is in your case (for example, the fastest time, the least amount of error, or the lowest cost).

A good example of direct testing is Netflix, which asked data scientists to help them improve ...