Don't Abandon Ideas That Flop - Research - Harvard Business Review

Don't Abandon Ideas That Flop - Research - Harvard Business Review

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW *

Research*

Don't Abandon Ideas That Flop *

11:15 AM Tuesday February 23, 2010 *by Andrew O’Connell Comments (2) *

Just minutes into its first screening, the ultraserious dramatic film The Room began eliciting laughter. Soon, people in the audience were "peeing in their pants," says a cast member who attended the premiere. It was pretty much a complete flop — in some people's view one of the worst movies ever made. *
So why is it still playing, nearly seven years later? Why was it at my favorite theater, the Coolidge Corner, the other night? *

Because it was a "false negative," to use Henry Chesbrough's term. It was one of those unpromising innovations that turn out, for unexpected reasons, to be great. *

Most of the time, these ideas vanish. After they fizzle, or after someone pulls the plug because of perceived impracticality or lack of strategic fit, they're put away forever. They don't get revived, because even if someone happens to remember them, they're tainted by early failure. *

But "all ideas have value," William Townsend of Jacksonville University writes in "Innovation and the Value of Failure" in a recent issue of the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research. Even the outliers. *

Both Townsend and Chesbrough are concerned about the same issue: Preventing old ideas from disappearing — an especially subtle problem in highly innovative organizations in which dozens and dozens of ideas are tried and abandoned. *

Chesbrough, the influential U.C. Berkeley researcher, has written and spoken about this problem a lot. In a 2004 article, "Managing Open Innovation," in Research Technology Management, he suggests that after terminating a project, a company should carefully watch to see what happens to it. Do developers and customers simply move on, or is there evidence of continuing interest? Are people still messing with it and talking about it? Did it somehow stick in people's minds? He suggests that companies build a "tracking system." If a terminated project continues to show signs of life, reassess its potential. *

The Room's writer-director-star, Tommy Wiseau, did just that, in a sense. He noticed that people thought his movie, which ends with the hero's suicide, was funny. Very funny. So he added a line to the ads: "Experience this quirky new black comedy, it's a riot!" The line was oddly off-key, like everything else about the movie, from the peculiar dialogue to the throwaway subplots to Wiseau's inky black, shoulder-length hair. (To get the full experience, go to a midnight screening in which audience members dress up as characters and throw cutlery and footballs at each other.) *

Just as Margaret Dumont seemed incapable of fathoming what was funny about her characters in the Marx Brothers' movies, Wiseau seems unclear about why people find his movie hilarious. But he must get, to quote Townsend, that a product's "valuation is a function of a consuming group's assessment of utility and not that of the producing organization." *

Often, Townsend suggests, an idea is simply ahead of its time. Companies should regularly revisit their discarded innovations to see whether the rest of the world might have caught up, just as the world is catching up to the sublime qualities of The Room. *

"Innovations should not be discarded," Townsend writes, "since it is inevitable that they will find value in some context." *

Access Original Post: *** http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/dont-abandon-ideas-that-flop.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.