Where do Good Ideas Come From?

While experiments are highly effective at testing guesses,

the output of your experiments is only going to be as good

as the quality of your input guesses.

Furthermore, running experiments does not automatically

lead to new insights.

Many experiments simply invalidate a bad idea

and leave you stuck.

This begs the question:

“Where do good guesses or ideas come from?”

The answer is that good ideas can come from anywhere.

In order to reach breakthrough you need to source ideas

from a wide and diverse pool:

Your internal team, your external team, peers, advisors, books, analogs, antilogs, etc.

The next challenge is that truly good ideas are rare

and often indistinguishable from bad ideas at first.

You need a systematic process for quickly vetting,

then testing through small, fast, additive experiments to

separate the good ideas from pack.