# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #11: Chase the Dumbest Idea in the Room
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I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. "How do you identify a truly great idea? As soon as someone says, 'That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!'" I've come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next. Some of the most important innovations begin life sounding ridiculous. Overnight delivery sounded absurd before FedEx. Many technologies we now treat as ordinary were dismissed because they violated the assumptions of their time. That is why ridicule can be a useful signal. Not proof that an idea is good, of course, but evidence that it may be challenging something everyone else has stopped questioning. When a room laughs at an idea, don't automatically kill it. Ask what assumption the idea just offended. Sometimes the laughter tells you more about the room than the idea. So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start. Action Items: Keep a list of ideas your team initially laughs at. For each one, identify the assumption it violates. Give one "ridiculous" idea a small, inexpensive test before dismissing it. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series. Real-World Examples These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world. Rwanda: The health system that decided to fly emergency blood to hospitals Blood products save lives, but getting the right type to a rural hospital at the right moment is a logistics problem that roads and warehouses do not always solve. In Rwanda, mountainous terrain and difficult journeys could delay urgent supplies for hours. In October 2016, the government launched a national medical drone delivery service with Zipline, initially serving 21 transfusing facilities in the country's western region. Hospitals could request emergency blood, and a fixed-wing drone would drop a small package by parachute near the destination. To a conventional supply-chain committee, the notion of using flying robots for routine medical logistics might have sounded extravagant. Yet the real comparison was not between a drone and an imaginary perfect truck. It was between fast delivery and the road system that actually existed. The World Health Organization subsequently reported cases where delivery times fell from roughly four hours to about 15 minutes. The service still required aviation oversight, blood handling standards and an economic model; technology did not replace those responsibilities. It changed the practical options available to clinicians. Rwanda was not trying to win an innovation contest. It was answering a life-or-death question with a solution that initially sounded improbable. Why it matters: An apparently absurd idea becomes much more reasonable when it is compared with the customer's real problem rather than with industry convention. Sources: The Waffle House Index: A breakfast menu becomes a disaster signal Emergency managers need to know which communities have power, roads, food supplies and enough functioning services to support people after a storm. Official damage assessments remain essential, but they can take time. Former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate developed an unexpectedly useful supplementary clue while working in Florida after Hurricane Charley in 2004: whether a local Waffle House was open, and how much of its menu it could serve. The restaurant chain was known for preparation that allowed it to operate or reopen in difficult conditions. A fully operational location suggested one level of local functioning; a restaurant serving a limited menu suggested disrupted power or supply lines; a closed restaurant could indicate serious damage. The resulting green, yellow and red Waffle House Index became an informal disaster-recovery signal, discussed in Associated Press reporting in October 2026. It is not an official replacement for emergency data or a universally reliable measurement. Its value is that someone recognized operational information in a place nobody would normally classify as an emergency-management system. In a world full of elaborate dashboards, a breakfast restaurant could provide a surprisingly immediate clue about local resilience. Why it matters: Useful intelligence sometimes comes from the strangest adjacent system. Ask what everyday behaviour might reveal a condition your official reports cannot yet see. Sources:

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-011/