Ideas constantly flow into businesses from a variety of sources. Businesses with strong innovation management processes routinely capture, visualize and curate that never-ending stream of ideas.

Healthy businesses in fact collect and generate far too many good ideas then they could ever successfully productize and convert to revenue. That allows them to prioritize and focus strictly on only the best ideas.

But if the vast majority of those ideas never become revenue generating product, are those leftover ideas valuable, worthless, or worse – a waste of time and resources?

Frankly, ideas are only valuable once backed by investment. Until they are properly backed by time, attention or money, ideas are merely a low-grade “raw material” of no immediate worth.

To be clear, the process of innovation management – collecting, generating and curating ideas – is a highly valuable and indeed a critical process to any successful business. But the ideas themselves are worthless sitting on some proverbial shelf.

So if you run a business that is successfully curating far too many good ideas, how can you use all the leftover innovative ideas? Let’s look at five ways to extract value:

• Ego boost: Everyone loves to feel smart, and stroking the creative egos of your team members by properly capturing the ideas they generate shows tremendous respect and builds a strong, open culture of communication. It doesn’t take much – usually just calling out and visualizing their ideas in an open, shared location is enough to satisfy most people (even without directly named attribution). A cheap process to recognize your team’s contributions.
• Internal thought leadership: Growing companies have diverse teams: People with different industry backgrounds, with different specializations, with different levels of experience. Using this rich catalogue of ideas as thought leadership for internal training will help bring everyone on the team up to the same level of industry knowledge/perspective, especially for understanding customer wants and future trends.
• External thought leadership: Modern marketing has an insatiable appetite for content. Start using those leftover ideas for social media fodder, blog posts, articles, conference presentations, etc. It is a great way to start testing and further prioritizing the secondary ideas that might not have made it to the top of the roadmap prioritization.
• Concept cars: The auto industry is very good at assembling groups of “wild ideas” for the future into gorgeous, inspiring concept cars that they trot out at major autoshows. These concept cars are a great way to test market trends while building the company’s brand. As long as they are clearly pitched as “future concepts” and the sales team is sternly informed that these ARE NOT FOR SALE – yet.
• Leveraged innovation: If the organization simply doesn’t have the resources to achieve its ambitious range of prioritized ideas, then this is where leveraged innovation programs can really fit. Independent corporate ventures that can attract external funding. Targeted M&A programs. Spin outs for equity stakes. Etc.

This concept of using leftover ideas in very public domains is almost completely opposite the attitude of so many managers who treat ideas as precious, valuable things that need IP protection and therefore must remain secret and locked away until so protected.

This stems directly from the problem of human creative ego: People highly value their own ideas while completely disregarding the ideas of others. They hyper-inflate the value of their own ideas in their minds. Most people, most of the time won’t value other people’s ideas until their minds are effectively tricked into believing those new ideas as their own internal ideas – which is why the way ideas are pitched are so critical to their acceptance. Imagine if Steve Ballmer pitched the iPhone instead of Steve Jobs. How different would the world be today?

For sure, there are a limited number of industry segments where cloak-and-dagger secrecy for product developments is truly important (defense, pharma, etc.). But for the vast majority of businesses, this is ridiculous.

In this modern world, time-based competition resoundingly trumps ego-driven secrecy every time. Your leftover ideas are growing stale every day. If you don’t find ways to extract value from them immediately, their potential value decreases precipitously.