I’ve often puzzled over where ideas come from. We all have them, sometimes you literally dream them up, other times it’s a collective endeavour.I remember a few years ago I woke up with a truly ridiculous idea. I’d been busy fitting my house with environmentally friendly kit – solar panels, batteries, wind turbines – all of that. But it was summer and I knew that my solar panels were producing lots of power I wasn’t using.
So I had an idea – whilst sleeping – at about 2am.
And it was this; I have an outdoor swimming pool/death trap. It has 100m cubed of water in it. What, I thought, about pumping the water into a raised tank when the sun shines? Then at night releasing said water back into the pool via a small turbine – so the power can be used when the sun is hiding on the other side of the planet. So I brushed up my school boy physics equations and reckoned it was goer – but then couldn’t for the life of me work out where I could hide a giant water tank from my wife in my garden! Project abandoned by about 6am.
Meeting Canary is excited by ideas as well – just simple visual tricks like showing a ‘light bulb’ above its beak helps everyone in a meeting to know that an idea is forming, follow that up with detailed action points and, most importantly, associating the actual person that came up with the idea – helps to identify the source.
Then. if a whole meeting is dedicated to expanding on this idea, Meeting Canary can keep up with the way the idea progresses, and make sure that everyone gets a chance to contribute to making things better.
We are also working on a concept to mine across an organisation – so that when a ‘good idea’ is generated Meeting Canary can help scan across an entire set of thousands of meetings to see if others are working on the same thing (or not, if the idea is a corker). The one thing we do know is good ideas are not always unique ideas. It will always be better to pull groups working on something similar together than to discover that your idea is already being worked on somewhere else in the corporate empire.
Oh and finally I must also confess that the water idea also came along with a truly stupid one – which (in my dream) involved using spare power to pull a heavy weight (my car) up a hill, and the turbine worked when the car was lowered back down, thereby proving that the saying ‘there are no such things as a bad ideas’ is actually quite wrong!