Freshen up your Idea Inventory

Toyota and Walmart wrote the book on managing inventory.  Each has some of the lowest inventory costs in their industries but certainly there is still more to learn.  The more inventory you have sitting around, the more tied up cash and cost you have. Just like cash, inventory loses value over time.  (Un-deployed cash loses value through inflation and inventory loses value through obsolescence, warehousing costs and stagnating cash flow).  Keeping fresh inventories enables you to keep up with newer and more current products and this is especially vital when innovation and product changes are coming more and more frequently.
    This same concept applies to innovation ideas as well.  When your basket of ideas is full and just sits there in the back of your mind it is a drag on your energy and capacity to generate new ideas and implement.  Lots of great ideas become obsolete if they are not acted on.  If they are truly valuable ideas then evaluating them should reveal that but sitting on them will only lead to idea paralysis.  If they are not great ideas then get rid of them and get on to the next because the more ideas you generate the better they get, it truly is a case of practice making perfect.  If your ideas are not increasing sales, or eliminating waste in your processes then they are just stagnant inventory and you need to fish or cut bait as they say and get on to something that will.  

​By: Kevin Minne
InnovationGrowthSystems.com  
720-354-0291

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