Luis Perez-Breva says “nearly all ideas are born bad.”
People often have a sense that there’s something broken. That hunch is what we often think of as an idea, but Breva explains why it is not. Ideas are what happens when those hunches get scaled up that into something that exists in the real world, and actually solves that problem.
“Being productively wrong” is how we should approach the evolution of ideas. The key to turning hunches into successful ideas is through the iterative process of trial and error, experimentation and failure. Entrepreneurs should focus on iteration, rather than venture capital funding rounds. Eventually, by being productively wrong, successful “doers” create products and services that solve operate to actually problems, and at that point should be funded.
Breva, who directs MIT’s Innovation Teams Program, is an entrepreneur who helped to create “mobile enhanced E911” — the mobile location technology for 911 emergency calls made from cellphones. He is the author of “Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting From a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong.”
Some of his favorite books are referenced here; conversation transcript will be is available here.
You can stream/download the full conversation, including the podcast extras on iTunes, Bloomberg, Overcast, and Soundcloud. Our earlier podcasts can all be found on iTunes, Soundcloud, Overcast and Bloomberg.
