# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #27: Critics of Crazy Ideas Are Usually Wrong By ## Article Content 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. 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. People often dismiss the future because they assume tomorrow must resemble today. That is why crazy ideas attract critics. They violate the mental model everyone is using. Yet history is full of technologies, products and business models that looked absurd right up until they became ordinary. Criticism can improve an idea. Cynicism usually just protects the status quo. The trick is learning to distinguish the person who is stress-testing your thinking from the person who cannot imagine a world different from the one they already know. 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: Ask critics to name the assumption behind their objection. Separate technical impossibility from "nobody does that today." Keep a record of ideas your organization once dismissed and later adopted. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series. Real-World Examples These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world. Norway's Ampere: A battery-powered car ferry crosses a fjord Large passenger ferries historically relied on diesel engines for a straightforward reason: they needed considerable power, day after day, with predictable schedules and little room for failure. A fully battery-powered car ferry sounded ambitious at a time when electric propulsion was still associated more with small vehicles than demanding commercial routes. A Norwegian public procurement requirement encouraged bidders to propose an innovative environmental measure for the Lavik-Oppedal route. Norled and its partners went further, developing the fully electric MF Ampere, which began operating in February 2015. The design paired a lightweight hull with rapid charging and battery-buffer systems at both ferry terminals. The shore-side batteries mattered because the local electrical grid could not provide the required burst of charging power directly. The answer was not simply to install bigger batteries on a boat. It was to redesign the ferry, docks and charging infrastructure as a system. Norled's tenth-anniversary account described major annual reductions in fuel use and emissions. What initially sounds like a fantastic vehicle concept becomes less implausible when the whole operating environment can be redesigned. Critics may evaluate an idea against today's infrastructure, while the innovator is imagining a different infrastructure that changes what is feasible. Why it matters: Before dismissing an idea as impractical, ask whether the surrounding system is the real constraint. Sources: Heerlen's flooded coal mines: Turning an abandoned liability into a heat network When a coal mine closes, its underground tunnels can fill with water. For a former mining community, that water may look like another reminder of lost industry, a maintenance concern or an unwanted legacy. In the Dutch city of Heerlen, planners explored the opposite question: could the water become a useful energy resource? The city's Minewater project began delivering heating and cooling in 2008 by using water from former mine passages. Different underground temperatures provided sources for heating and cooling, linked to a district network serving buildings. The system later developed into Minewater 2.0, with energy exchange between local building clusters. European Commission case material describes Heerlen as an early example of fifth-generation district heating and cooling. It is not a universal solution; the geology, available mine workings, temperatures and infrastructure matter. But the project demonstrates how a community can turn a seemingly obsolete industrial asset into part of a new energy system. The initial proposal could easily have been dismissed as an attempt to heat offices with a derelict mine. The practical innovation came from taking that unfamiliar possibility seriously enough to test the engineering. The old mine was not merely a symbol of yesterday. It became a resource for tomorrow. Why it matters: The stranger the proposal sounds, the more useful it may be to examine its underlying physics before rejecting it. Sources: --- --- Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/11/how-innovation-happens-lesson-027/