You can never have too many ideas

I’ve been working on a pitch with a local agency for the last few days.

Over the course of a day, the head-of-art and I generated enough ideas to fill three walls of the office we were working in.

Obviously many of those ideas will never see the light of day.

They might be off brief. They could be wrong for the brand. Quite a few of them are probably crap.

None of that matters, at least I don’t think so.

The more ideas you have, the more chance you have of cracking a really big one.

I found a great little piece on this very subject on the always interesting Thought Spurs.

A few years back the Mini production line in England was stopped each week so that the workers could brainstorm new ideas.

Each worker was asked to generate three small ideas a year. This resulted in 14,000 new ideas, 11,000 of which were implemented.

Not bad.

Except that over in Japan, Toyota’s employee suggestion scheme generates two million ideas a year of which around 85% are implemented.

Just goes to show, the best way to have a great idea is to have car loads of them.

Even if most of them are crap.