Reinventing the Organization

CHAPTER 8

Idea Generation

How Can You Generate and Generalize Ideas That Will Have an Impact on the Ecosystem?

Sir James Dyson worked his way through 5,126 failed prototypes before coming up with a design that ultimately transformed household cleaning (a bagless vacuum cleaner).¹ Pixar’s teams create, on average, 125,000 storyboards to make a ninety-minute feature film, winnowing them to the 12,000 that constitute the actual feature. Edwin Catmull, president of Pixar sums it up: “Early on, all of our movies suck … [O]ur job is to make them go … from suck to non-suck. We are true believers in the iterative process—reworking, reworking and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.”²