Ideas for innovation come from many sources.

• New technological possibilities  can be used to create and evolve new products.
• New industry developments can create new strategic pressures and opportunities that make new products competitive.
• New insights into people and the details of their lives can show how new products might fit into and transform their worlds.
• New combinations of skills in inter-disciplinary teams provided the right conditions and supports can co-invent new ideas impossible for isolated individuals.
• New innovation tools, techniques and approaches can produce and evolve new products.
• New forms of analysis can lead to new understandings of situations that reveal new opportunities to innovate.
• And — at the risk of sounding old-fashioned — inspiration can strike a person at any time, in any place, for any reason or no reason at all.

This is not even close to a complete list. Most people prefer one or another source and sometimes would have their organization cultivate only one or a few sources instead of as many as possible. But why? Perhaps because most organizations already have many ideas and are looking for ways to narrow the list.

But really, what is needed is a way to evaluate ideas and select the best ones. And the majority of organizations rely on one method, which could be called “table-thinking” — people sitting behind desks and tables, presenting, debating and deciding things about distant situations they at best partially understand and largely misunderstand.