My colleague Gwen Ishmael and I have written a new white paper: Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places: An Argument for Staying in the Box. In a nutshell, this paper shares our learnings about how to go about putting good, actionable ideas into your pipeline so your entire new product or service development process can work more efficiently.

In this paper, what we're saying is you have to put some thought into how and where you look for ideas. It's not enough to have creative ideas, if those ideas are wildly richocheting off the ceiling and walls and are so far out they can't be developed into the products, services and/or processes you need. Nor is it enough to build a well-thought-out innovation or product development process, if that process starts with "Let's brainstorm to get some ideas" or "We don't need to look outside our company for ideas, we can come up with all we need on our own."

Your innovation process shouldn't start at the moment ideas are introduced into the pipeline -- it should start with where and how those ideas are created in the first place. We talk about how in "Looking For Ideas In All the Wrong Places." I'll run excerpts from this paper here for the rest of the week, but if you want to see the whole thing at once, here's a link to the PDF.