Great progress has been made in developing processes and tools to help entrepreneurs take an idea and search for the right business model and turn it into a new venture.

Not a lot, however, has been done to develop processes around taking an interesting idea and evolving it into something truly amazing and disruptive.

Imposible?  No.  You first need to look at where good ideas come from… Steven Johnson has done a lot of work on this topic and has a great video about it here.

My favorite quote from Steven comes at the end of his video … “Chance favors the connected mind”.

At the University of Michigan we have a tremendous opportunity to generate really good ideas given the deep research, faculty expertise and amazing student talent.  The challenge, as one would expect, is to create opportunities to connect people and ideas in ways that generate truly disruptive and great ideas.

At the Center for Entrepreneurship we are experimenting with ways to develop a process that is efficient at doing just this.  Many of our programs at the Center are designed to include opportunities for connections to be made and ideas to ignite.

Ultimately, I see these experiments turning into accepted processes that can help connect, create and generate truly disruptive ideas.  I’ve never been a fan of leaving things up to “chance”.