How to have an innovative idea in three simple steps

Jeremy Utley

Want to generate a game-changing idea? Stanford University’s Jeremy Utley delves into the three-step process of fostering innovation.

Quick: come up with an innovative idea!

If you’re anything like most of the thousands of executives and graduate students I’ve coached over the last baker’s dozen years, panic alarms just went off.

“You can’t just do that,” you might think. “Innovation doesn’t obey instructions – or follow rules.”

But the truth is, the creative process is hardly a mystery – in fact, it can be broken down into three simple steps.

Step 1: Make a bug list

It’s a common misconception that ideas come from nowhere, pouncing on unsuspecting ideators unannounced. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Brilliant ideas come to those who have developed something of an obsession for a particular problem, and so the question begs to be asked: “What’s your problem?”

The simple way to discover your problem is the aforementioned bug list. I’m not referring to errors in lines of code. This is an assignment we’ve been giving students at Stanford since the 1960s, long before computer programming entered common parlance. 

Essentially, a bug list is a running list of things that “bug” you. That’s how Lorraine Sarayeldin stumbled upon the initial spark for what would become her food business, Pom Pom Paddock. She became obsessively attuned to the things that annoyed her – like, for example, making cauliflower rice by hand for every meal.

Forget about the solution in these early stages – instead, keep a bug list and, over time, you’ll find a problem worthy of your attention.

Step 2: Generate bad ideas

Why start with bad ideas? 

Because limiting your search to “good” is practically hopeless. Instead, you should be looking for more ideas – and the best way to start the flow is to generate bad ones.

In her acceptance speech for the Innovators Award at the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards, singer–songwriter Taylor Swift attested to the value of bad ideas within the creative process. 

“I really, really want everyone to know, especially young people, that the hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that I’ve had are what led me to my good ideas. You have to give yourself permission to fail.”

Generate bad ideas, and your failure-avoiding mind will eventually do the rest.

Step 3: Try out more than one

The last piece of the puzzle is to recognise that innovation is a low-yield activity. That is to say, very few innovative ideas actually work.

If you want to know how you can have an innovative idea that works (and who doesn’t want that?), then the answer is, try a bunch of the things that you think might be innovative and see which one actually works.

There it is: three steps to innovative ideas.

Jeremy Utley is the Director of Executive Education at Stanford University’s d.school, and the co-author of Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters.