You have to chip away at it and shape it to let the winning idea emerge.

I find social media as fun and engaging as the next person, but imagine if all the creative talent that was pouring into finding increasingly clever ways for us to broadcast daily banality (and then serve ads based on what is learned) instead focused on some of the UN Millennium goals? The world would be a better place.

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer.

First you document your idea. You should be comprehensive, but that doesn't mean you have to produce a doctoral thesis length plan. Rather you want to make sure you have touched all the different things that have to happen to succeed. Then, you evaluate your approach. The goal here isn't to figure out if your idea is good or bad, but rather to begin to figure out what are some of its weakest elements.

It takes a great deal of humility to recognize you have made a wrong turn on the road to successful innovation, but better to stop and try a radically different approach then to continue down the wrong route for too long.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to embrace the idea of spurring creativity by letting hundreds of flowers bloom. I've never seen that lead to anything other than cynicism and hundreds of dead flowers.

Think about how you will start and where you will go. Get the head with logic and the heart with visuals or stories. And think about your core customer and all the other stakeholders as well.