Idea Autopsy: What Kills Breakthrough Ideas?

Why voting on ideas too early misses the opportunity

Most innovation processes follow a predictable pattern: research user needs, generate as many ideas as possible, then let the team vote with colourful dots to select the "best" concepts. This approach feels democratic and efficient - but it's also why so many innovation efforts produce incremental improvements rather than breakthrough solutions.

The problem isn't with ideation itself. Most teams excel at generating creative concepts when given the right environment and stimulus. The critical flaw lies in stage three: how we evaluate and select which ideas deserve further development.

Dot voting treats innovation like a popularity contest, as of right now. When teams place their coloured stickers on favorite concepts, they're making snap judgments based on what feels familiar, feasible, or safe. This process is fundamentally backward-looking, like driving in reverse, using existing metrics to evaluate the potential of tomorrow's opportunities.

Consider what actually happens during a typical dot voting session. Team members scan dozens of ideas posted on walls, quickly assessing each concept against their current understanding of the market, technology constraints, and organizational capabilities. The ideas that receive the most votes are typically those that:

• Solve problems everyone already recognises

• Build on existing competencies and assets

• Feel immediately achievable with current resources

• Align with conventional wisdom about customer needs

The result? Teams consistently select ideas that represent safe, incremental improvements to the status quo. The truly innovative concepts - those that might address unrecognised needs or create entirely new market categories, are filtered out because they don't align with today's assumptions about value and feasibility.

I recently worked with a 9 yr old class of children to see what ideas they had to solve the problem of sea lice in fish farms (a problem that costs the industry $Billions every year). We had a lot of early ideas, and as I will explain later, dot voting would have definitely lost the most (in the future) valuable.

Dot voting optimises for consensus, not breakthrough innovation.

When we vote on a flat list of disparate ideas, we lose the nuanced relationships between concepts and miss the deeper patterns that could reveal transformative opportunities.

A Better Way: Opportunity Mapping

Instead of rushing to judgment through dot voting, innovation teams need a more sophisticated approach to understanding their ideation landscape. Opportunity mapping offers a powerful alternative that shifts focus from evaluating individual ideas to identifying promising areas where future value could exist.

Rather than treating each idea as an isolated solution competing for attention, opportunity mapping groups concepts into coherent opportunity areas; clusters of related insights that point toward underlying patterns in user needs, market gaps, or technological possibilities.

This process reveals three critical types of relationships that dot voting obscures:

Overlapping Opportunities: Multiple ideas that address the same fundamental need from different angles, suggesting a robust area worthy of deeper exploration.

Adjacent Opportunities: Concepts that operate in nearby problem spaces, indicating potential for solution families or platform approaches that could address multiple needs simultaneously.

Combinatorial Opportunities: Ideas that could be merged or layered together to create more comprehensive solutions than any single concept could provide alone.

By mapping these relationships, teams can identify opportunity areas that demonstrate both depth (multiple approaches to the same need) and breadth (connections to adjacent problems). These areas represent zones of potential innovation that are far more promising than any individual idea evaluated in isolation.

The opportunity mapping process transforms a chaotic collection of ideas into a structured landscape of innovation potential.

Instead of asking "Which idea should we build?" teams begin asking more strategic questions: "Where do we see the strongest signals of unmet need?" and "Which opportunity areas offer the greatest potential for breakthrough value creation?"

From Opportunity Areas to Innovation Strategy

Once teams have identified their most promising opportunity areas, the real innovation work begins. Unlike dot voting, which drives toward immediate solution selection, opportunity mapping creates a foundation for deeper investigation and experimental learning.

Each identified opportunity area becomes a focus for two complementary activities:

Qualitative Research: Opportunity areas highlight where teams need to understand more about underlying user needs, market dynamics, or technological possibilities. This isn't about validating predetermined solutions, it's about developing richer insights into why these opportunities exist and what conditions would need to be true for solutions to succeed.

Teams can pursue ethnographic research, expert interviews, foresight analysis of weak signals, or ecosystem mapping to build deeper understanding of their target opportunity areas. The goal is to move beyond surface-level problem statements toward nuanced comprehension of user contexts, motivations, and unmet needs. Foresight analysis becomes particularly valuable here, helping teams detect weak signals that might indicate emerging opportunities or shifting user behaviours that others haven't yet recognised.

Solution Pathway Exploration: Simultaneously, teams can begin exploring potential solution directions through rapid prototyping and experimentation. Rather than committing to specific ideas, this involves testing fundamental assumptions about how value might be created within each opportunity area.

This might include technical prototypes that explore feasibility questions, service concepts that test user interaction models, or business model experiments that examine value creation and capture mechanisms. The key is maintaining a level of uncertainty while building understanding of what could work.

For the sea lice example, this involved going to the local fish market, finding some sea lice attached to a salmon, and firing a laser at them: this will make more sense a little later!

Discovering White Space in the Opportunity Landscape

After extensive preliminary research and ideation, teams typically identify 5-6 distinct opportunity areas that represent the most promising zones for innovation.

But the real breakthrough insights often emerge from examining the white space - the gaps and unexplored territory between and around these mapped opportunity areas.

White space analysis asks critical questions about what's missing from the overall landscape: Are there user needs that none of the opportunity areas address? Do adjacent industries or user segments reveal unexplored possibilities? Are there technological capabilities or business model innovations that could create entirely new opportunity categories?

Teams should map not just where opportunities exist, but where they don't, and ask whether those gaps represent genuine absence of need or simply unrecognised potential waiting for a solution.

Back to my earlier example with the class of 9 year olds, one idea that came up was using an underwater drone to scrape the lice off before they got established, and another was a pea shooter that would flick off the lice in a washing station. Combining these 2 (that would have not got any dot-votes in an established environment) could easily have led to this fantastic solution. “An underwater robot that shoots each individual sea lice”

The Innovation Advantage

This shift from dot voting to opportunity mapping fundamentally changes how innovation teams operate. Instead of making premature decisions based on limited information, teams develop the patience and discipline to understand their innovation landscape before committing resources to specific solutions.

Opportunity mapping enables teams to:

• See beyond obvious solutions by recognising patterns that individual ideas might miss

• Build conviction gradually through research and experimentation rather than snap judgments

• Maintain strategic flexibility by exploring opportunity areas rather than locking into specific concepts

• Allocate resources wisely by focusing on areas with the strongest signals of innovation potential

• Create breakthrough solutions by understanding the deeper needs and contexts that opportunity areas represent

The most innovative companies succeed by being better at recognising opportunity areas where others see only isolated problems, then developing the capabilities to turn those opportunities into breakthrough solutions.

Moving Forward

The next time your team completes an ideation session, resist the urge to immediately start voting on individual concepts. Instead, step back and look for the patterns, relationships, and opportunity areas that your collective insights and ideas have revealed.

Ask yourselves: What themes are emerging? Where do we see multiple ideas pointing toward the same underlying need? Which areas feel adjacent or combinatorial? Where are the white spaces that no one else is exploring?

Then commit to the harder but more rewarding work of understanding these opportunity areas deeply enough to create solutions that didn't exist before your team began mapping the territory.

The stakes are higher than just better innovation outcomes. Teams that discover and develop truly novel opportunity areas, especially those in the white spaces others have missed, position themselves for significant competitive advantages.

These breakthrough innovations often become defensible through patents, create first-mover advantages in emerging markets, and establish new standards that others must follow.

Innovation isn't about picking winners from a list of ideas. It's about discovering opportunity areas where breakthrough value can be created, and having the curiosity and persistence to turn those opportunities into defensible competitive advantages that reshape entire markets.