The most tired (and over-used) management story on the planet is how 3M came to make the Post-It pad.  Remember - a 3M employee used a not very sticky glue to put bits of paper in his hymm book and eventually has to ..... oh I can't even bring myself to repeat it.

For every great idea that someone gets through the barbed wire and trenches of internal barriers, there are many thousands that die a slow death locked up in cupboards and desks.

When I work with companies on driving innovation in their R&D activities, one of the simplest questions to ask is 'what's in the cupboard.'  People bring out old prototypes, talk about concepts they once developed etc. You'll notice it's a metaphorical cupboard - the ideas could be in their head, on paper somewhere (never on the back of an envelope in my experience), on their hard drive etc.

The challenge you have when faced with all these ideas, or when you generate them from scratch, is that not all ideas are born equal or are comparable. How do you compare a minor improvement to the performance of a chip with a piece of software?

The simple answer is you can't. The more complex answer is that you don't want to.  Few innovative ideas can just be lined up and sorted.  Let's forget all the problems to do with having the budget to exploit the ideas and forget the resources the different ideas might need. The biggest problem is understanding how ideas might fit together and what that might mean for the company.

Let's have an example to illustrate this. A few years ago, eye surgery using lasers required a room full of equipment. However, the cost and power output of laser diodes was improving such that a company spotted that, at a certain point, it would be possible to create portable kits at a fraction of the price - exploiting these advances in laser diodes.

Having the ideas is not the challenge, the challenge is finding ways to group/cluster them that makes sense to the business. Then it's down to Druckerifying things (with apologies for this mutilating of his quote).

Do the right things.

Do the things you do right.