The next thing innovators do better than everyone else is that they use their ideas. They do something with them. The cleverest idea in the world won't be worth anything if it remains in the space between our ears. Innovation requires us to act.

However, taking your idea out of your mind and into the real world can be daunting. There are problems to solve, obstacles to overcome, managers to convince, bureaucratic inertia to defeat, and perhaps money to find. All of that takes time and energy, and aren't you busy enough already?

And what if you go to all that effort only to discover that your idea doesn't work! Or that it will cost too much? Or you will have to fight so many battles along the way, and make so many compromises, that it will cause you more pain than it's worth?

These are all, unfortunately, legitimate concerns.

Everyone who has had an innovative idea has faced some, if not all, of these obstacles. But if they hadn't pressed on regardless, then we wouldn't have toasters or flowerpots or tyres. There's only one way to find out how good an idea is, and that is to test it out in the real world.

Do the next thing

Once you have had an idea, and have grown it, it's time to start using it. Here's a way to make using your idea seem more manageable. Don't think about the eighty-six things you need to do to turn your idea into a reality. Just think about the next thing. Work out the next thing you need to do to develop your idea. It might be:

• writing it down
• drawing it
• making a flow chart that shows how it works
• collaborating with someone who has knowledge or skills you don't possess to get more information
• pitching it to someone
• designing it
• making it
• setting up a trial
• implementing the idea.

Or it might be something else.

Whatever the next thing to do is, just do that. Don't think about everything that needs to be done, just the next thing. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step'. We can all take that single step. And then another one.

Once you work out what the next thing to do is, give yourself a deadline to do it by, and then do it.

Then do that next thing.

Find the end point of each idea

Again, take the pressure off. When developing ideas, your aim shouldn't be to incorporate each one of them into the business. That would be nice, but it's probably not realistic. The aim should be to find the end point of every idea. That is, to make each idea as good as it can be. And if you do that and along the way it becomes clear that the idea isn't good enough to become part of your business, then let it go. We know that only a small percentage of ideas will go all the way to implementation, so the aim should be to find how far each idea can go, as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

Accept that most of the ideas you have, for one reason or another, won't end up being used. That's okay. It's normal. If one in ten, or even one out of twenty, of your ideas is incorporated into what you do and makes a measurable and consistent improvement to your business, then it will probably have been time well spent.

How, then, do you find that one good idea in ten? The only way to get to the one usable idea is to go through every idea. We need to advance each and every idea up to the point where it becomes clear that it is not going to improve the way we do things. Don't dismiss an idea until you're sure it won't work. Try to avoid acting on hunches. Often hunches are right, but sometimes they're wrong.

The tricky part is to advance your ideas without using up too much time and money. So take small steps. If we accept that most of the ideas we have will fail, then the aim becomes to find the ones that will fail as quickly and cheaply as possible, before we spend too much time and money on them.

If you have ten ideas, don't pick the one you think is going to work. Have a process. Move each idea one step forward as cheaply as possible. For each idea work out what the next thing to do is, then do it.

Do it on a small scale, and use the resources you have as cleverly and efficiently as you can. If you don't have sufficient resources to advance every idea, then evaluate the following three factors:

• the potential benefits of the idea
• the likelihood of it becoming a viable part of your business
• the cost of developing the idea.

Then pick the ideas that appear to have the greatest chance of providing a benefit, and advance them.

Move each idea one step forward, then assess the results. It may well be that in taking an idea one step forward, it becomes clear that it isn't going to work, or that it is going to be too expensive to implement, or that it won't produce the benefits you were hoping for, or there are some problems that need to be ironed out before it can progress further.

If that happens, you can either discard that idea, or set it aside for further development. Then the remaining ideas can be taken another step forward. Again, assess the results to see if they indicate that there are any more ideas not worth taking further. In this way, slowly we whittle our ideas down to the most viable ones.

For example, imagine that you have an idea to improve the efficiency of one of your processes. In developing the idea you might discover that while the new process looks more efficient than the old one, the cost of implementing it will be greater than the money it would save. If you grapple with that problem for a while and can't find a solution, then it's time to set that idea aside and move on to the next one.

Don't keep throwing resources at an idea just because you really like it, if it's clear that there is a significant problem. Go back and think about how to solve the problem first. Try not to get too attached to your ideas, or to let emotion cloud your judgement. Perhaps you really like an idea and you spent a lot of time developing it. You were excited when you first thought of it and you desperately want it to work. These are not good reasons to keep throwing resources at an idea whose end point you have already found.

Failure is part of the innovation process, and every idea that fails gets you closer to the one that will succeed. The only good reason to invest time and money into developing an idea for your business is that you think there is a good chance it could make your business better. So when it becomes clear that an idea isn't going to end up being implemented in your business, say goodbye to it.

If your idea fails, it doesn't mean you are stupid or worthless or incapable of being innovative. It just means that that particular idea didn't work. Don't take it personally. It's just an idea.

Operate on as small a scale as possible. If you are doing a trial of an idea in a medium or big business, don't trial it everywhere. Just pick one small part of the business to run a trial in. Keep it simple, keep it cheap and don't be scared to say goodbye to ideas that fall over. Every time an idea doesn't work you can think, ‘Great! Now I'm one idea closer to the good one'.

Bring in other people

As the idea develops, bring in other minds. At every stage, ask people to look at the idea and give you their opinion on it. Ask:

• What do they think of the idea?
• What do they see as its potential benefits?
• What problems do they see?
• How would they overcome those problems?
• Do they have any suggestions on how to improve the idea?

Talking to other people about your idea is a cheap and effective way of developing it. The hardest part of developing an idea is the start, because you are trying to create something out of nothing. Once you have an idea, then other minds that work a little differently from yours may be able to see opportunities to develop it that you might not have thought of. Or they may spot a problem that you hadn't thought of, and maybe even come up with a way to overcome it.

When developing an idea, whenever you get stuck, talk it over with someone else. Even if they can't solve your problem, it may be that sharing your idea with someone sparks your brain to think in a different way, suggesting a way forward.

Sometimes you need to persist

Sometimes a good idea will require a great deal of persistence to get right.

The all-purpose lubricant WD-40 is used, among other things, to stop tools rusting and hinges squeaking. It's a very successful product. According to surveys by the manufacturer it can be found in up to 80 per cent of American homes
and it enjoys sales worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The reason it's called WD-40 is that they had 40 goes at it before they got it right.

You would imagine that after WD-26 had problems they would have been getting pretty fed up, and when they still hadn't nailed it with WD-37 no one would have blamed them if they had thrown in the towel. But they must have known they were onto something, and it was just a matter of continuing to get it wrong and persisting until eventually they got it right.