Entrepreneurship: 3 Ways To Fast-Track Ideas To Execution Today

Entrepreneurship is many things.

It is idea generation, innovation and, most of all, hard work.

Many entrepreneurs I know – whether they’re self-employed or hired in specific innovation roles for leading companies – find the toughest and most rewarding part, execution.

Here are three pieces of advice to help you overcome challenges and fast-track your ideas to execution.

1. Entrepreneurship, Mindset & ‘The Learning Loop’

Execution is where we face our biggest fears – will the idea work, will customers like it, what if it doesn’t succeed?

It’s important we recognise that this is a natural part of the process. If we don’t go through this, we cannot learn.

This is why the best entrepreneurs I know treat execution very differently.

They switch their mindset. They take on the perspective that every time an idea doesn’t work, it isn’t ‘failure’, it’s ‘learning’. And we must go through learning in order to make our ideas stand out in the world.

This learning loop is the secret of success for some of the world’s business leaders.

Ray Dalio, leader of one of the most successful financial institutions in the world,Bridgewater, went through many obstacles and major challenges to become successful and at every step of his journey, leveraged this learning loop.[1]

2. Understand The Creative Cycle of Innovation

In 1926 Graham Wallas, a social psychologist and co-founder of the London School of Economics, shared a model on creativity that explains how ideas move through different stages toward execution.[2]

The model outlines four stages of the creative process.

Preparation: when we’re working on an idea, this requires us to gather and sift through information, as part of our preparation activities.
Incubation: as the name of this stage suggests, this is where our conscious and unconscious sorts through information in order to weaken lose threads, strengthen ties of our central ideas, and identify innovative concepts.
Illumination: in this stage we become aware of the connections of our ideas. What seemed disconnected, starts to form an order that makes sense to us.
Verification: verification is the stage where, having realized and given shape to an idea, we communicate it to others to validate it.

This model has largely held up until this day, though subsequent studies have elaborated upon each of its phases.

The first two stages are where ideas come easy. It’s not unusual to wind up with hundreds of ideas. Our minds are alight with possibility and it’s an incredibly exciting process.

When we shift to illumination and verification, this is when we start to get into the execution of ideas.

At these stages, we have to treat ideas differently, because suddenly they will require many more processes if we’re to illuminate and verify them – concepting, prototyping, testing with customers, and investing in their development.

Because of all this effort, it’s not possible to work with all the ideas we held at the previous stages of preparation and incubation.

We need to filter and prioritize our ideas, so that we take only a handful through to the next stages, so they have the best access to our resources. If we take too many ideas through to the final stages, we split our focus, and it becomes harder to thoroughly test ideas.

James Dyson is renowned for taking 15 years and 5,127 prototypes before he launched the first cyclone technology design. While he worked on many prototypes, he never lost sight of the one central idea that drove his entire process – the bagless vacuum cleaner.

Entrepreneurs who take too many ideas through to verification may often find themselves overwhelmed by the competing demands of testing many ideas or in a constant state of juggling resources. Prioritizing which ideas will go through to verification and commence their execution journey is a good way to overcome this.

3. Prioritize & Filter What We Take To Execution

When we’re dealing with hundreds of ideas, we need a way to filter and prioritize what we’ll take through to execution.

Many companies have different methods to do this, including:

Rank & Rate: Some put all ideas into a spreadsheet and rank ideas according to different lenses. For example, having a lens of ‘market growth potential’ and ranking the idea from 1 to 10. Usually, teams doing this work target five to seven lenses and no more (or the system becomes too complex). Only the ideas with the highest scores go through to subsequent stages.
Expert Panel: Other companies might use a panel of experts, and use this panel to rank and rate ideas, before they go through to execution. The panel of experts acts like a ‘shark tank’ for new ideas. But with this, even experts cannot always spot what will be a success.
Lite Market Testing: Some teams use a ‘lite’ method to rapidly market-test ideas as part of their prioritization process. Without going to a full prototype, for example, they might use online surveys to test initial concepts, as a way to filter out weaker ideas.
Forced Constraints: Another method is to apply a ‘forced constraint’ to make sure that resources aren’t over-expended on too many ideas. This constraint might involve “only allowing three ideas to be tested at one time”. Until an idea exits the verification process, the team simply does not look at any other idea.
Internal Critiques: every company has access to their own in-house expertise. We can tap into this experience, by running internal critique sessions to examine, refine and eject ideas, before they go to execution. Apple’s Industrial Design Group for some time has used a pattern of workshopping and critiquing ideas amongst the sixteen or so designers that form part of this group.[3]

Whichever the method, the most important thing is to ‘narrow the field’ of ideas that will proceed through to execution. The goal is to avoid over-stretching ourselves by having too many ideas to execute (or illuminate and verify) and the best way to do this is to only allow a handful to go through to execution.

What are the methods your team uses to work through entrepreneurial ideas? You might consider leaving a comment below so others can learn from your perspective.

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