Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision

I read an interesting article in Harvard Business Review which I want to share with the readers of my blog.....

In the past decade, firms have been praised for ideas. Experts have celebrated the power of brainstorming and idea-generation techniques. Businessmen have been asked to improve their creative attitudes. And 2009 was named the Year of Creativity and Innovation by the European Union.

One consequence of a decade focused on idea generation is ideas are now more easily accessible, which has also made idea generation less of a differentiator in competition than it has traditionally been. When more than 30% of the population belongs to the creative class, ideas are not in short supply. And with the diffusion of open innovation processes, ideas competitions, and the like, executives are increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas.

What is in short supply, are visionary thinkers who will be capable of making sense of this abundance of stimuli — visionaries who will build the arenas to unleash the power of ideas and transform them into actions.

Could the next decade be the decade of vision building? If so, we will witness a significant shift in the way we think about innovation, creativity, and leadership. Popular studies of creativity have equated it with the fast generation of numerous ideas (the more, the better); in contrast, visionary leadership requires a relentless exploration of one direction (the deeper and more robust, the better). Vision building is based on research and deep understanding. To generate fresh ideas we need to think outside of the box and then jump back in; vision building destroys the box and builds a new one. It does not play with the existing paradigms; it changes them. Studies of idea generation have lingered on variety and divergence, but vision building is based on convergence, on bringing others onboard.
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