Ideas < Immersion

Written By Nick Glavan

Last week, I attended the VentureWell OPEN virtual conference, which brought together innovators and educators from across the country and beyond to share research, experiences, best practices, trends, and tools to better prepare entrepreneurs and their advisors for navigating early-stage startup challenges. My favorite panel was candidly titled, “Screw Ideas” which presented an illuminating manifesto for developing entrepreneurial thinking in a new way.

Most entrepreneurs are familiar with the term “ideation” and may consider it the first step of building a startup. It often feels like the most fun step too, where we get to think up a new solution beyond the current offerings to solve a problem. But what if we were to cut off the love affair with ideation? The panel pointed to the serious negatives of ideation, especially it’s tendency to marry an entrepreneur to a theorized idea super early in the process. This typically leads to instances of halting progress when founders are inflexibly attached to a solution that is not novel nor impactful for the intended users. Ideation creates an environment where an entrepreneur acquires tunnel vision for advancing only their initial idea, rather than pivoting or adjusting to create a true solution for the market.

​You may have done the famous “spaghetti and marshmallow” ice breaker game. You’re given sticks of dry pasta and marshmallows, and you’re told to construct the highest, free-standing tower within a time limit. You could begin with ideation, by drawing out a build plan or thinking of how you might combine smaller structures together for more stability. But the tallest towers are typically created by people who spend almost no time thinking about how to do it; they begin by doing. Constructing, failing, learning, and pivoting resulted in success, while ideation was wasted time.

The panelists encouraged the audience (and now I am encouraging you) to change our approach to learning and developing innovations. Put simply, don’t initiate your process with thinking. 

Instead, begin your entrepreneurial journey by immersing yourself within the environment where the problem you want to address occurs. Many entrepreneurs are solving problems they experience firsthand, and thus might feel they are already within the environment of focus. But as individuals, we have a limited perspective in trying to understand the problem from only our own lived experiences. To really understand a problem, and its impact on a base of customers, we need to observe many worldviews from members of a community(or in more entrepreneurial terms, a customer segment). Learning about the problem to be addressed from multiple stakeholders is a key to turning a personal solution into a market-adopted innovation.

While you learn more about the community members’ experiences with the problem, you’ll participate in natural collaboration. You’ll be the conduit for merging many worldviews and experiences, and you will learn the most significant value the community at large is seeking. The goal in this process is to learn and understand, and not to sell an ideated solution. You’ll naturally navigate yourself toward a customer-valued solution by engaging the community.

Even still, there are pitfalls along the way. Most of us have been brought up immersed in an educational environment of some sort. We’ve been trained to provide right answers in order to gain points. Entrepreneurship, and especially the early stages of innovation development, don’t work this way. You don’t have to do everything 100% *correct* to get all the rewards, because the goal is not a grade. You have to un-train yourself and prioritize seeking out problems rather than coming up with the right idea. You will be able to build a solution after you’ve engaged fully with the community experiencing this problem, but not before.

You also have to possess courage to admit when your initial conclusions are invalidated by community feedback. Thanks to educational training that encourages pride in ideas but shame in being wrong, it can be challenging to build up this type of courage. In entrepreneurship, you need to embrace being incorrect, so that you can learn and pivot to find a better path. Failing to acknowledge critical, disinterested, or other forms of negative feedback is self-sabotage for an entrepreneur and may lead to spending significant time chasing an un-adoptable solution.
The route to success in innovation is based in community immersion, not ideation. Once you’ve learned the process for entrepreneurship, which differs from the typical educational environment, you’ll be able to apply the strategy to many problems in your, and your customers’ lives. 
Our I-Corps program offers a 7-week course focused on teaching the methodology of collecting feedback from customers.  I’m already thinking of ways to incorporate more of the lessons learned from the “Screw Ideas” panel into our next cohort this summer. I hope you’ll consider joining us to learn this entrepreneurial strategy and apply it to many facets of your life. 

The next I-Corps cohort will kick off June 2022. Applications are open NOW through May 22.