Rick Borovoy had a fascinating take on the innovation process as he experienced it in the creation of the nTAG Interactive. With only 15 minutes to speak (that's the length of all the stories being told here), he got right down to the essence of the dynamic, ever-shifting innovation process: you must please all the constituencies who are collaborating with you, but not by adding more and more to the idea. Instead you boil the idea down to the one thing it had to be in order not to be anything else.

This is fascinating to me because I spend a lot of my professional life working with clients and consumers to come up with new ideas. And a critical part of that process is trying to articulate exactly what the ideas are. Ideation is a messy business and works best that way, idea management software notwithstanding. But -- in any case, the idea is always exactly as Borovoy said -- it's the one thing that remains when you remove everything that isn't an essential part of it, or a variation of it, or a build on it.

It's absolutely critical to correctly identify ideas, becuase you can't move into any kind of building or evaluative phase unless you can articulate the ideas. An unarticulated idea is a lost idea.