How to Make Idea Curation Your Workplace Superpower

We live in a knowledge economy—ideas are the currency of success. They fuel new products, new customer acquisition strategies, and new ways of conducting business. One great idea can make you a hero. And who among us doesn’t aspire to be a hero?

But the thing about ideas is that there's a massive surplus of them. Google darn near anything you can think of and a bare minimum of 100 ideas—articles, products, solutions—will be staring back at you in an instant. In the digital age, anyone and everyone can put their ideas out there in the world. And anyone and everyone does.

So, if having too many ideas is the problem, maybe creating new ideas isn’t the best use of your time and skill. What if we used our critical thinking capabilities to curate them, instead?

What is idea curation?

Imagine an art museum. As you walk through it, you notice and appreciate the paintings and sculptures. The experience you’re having was crafted by a curator: someone whose job wasn’t to produce the art, but rather to group, arrange, and purpose it with intention. Curation is a separate skill that complements creation.

The artist is famous. The curator rarely is. But that doesn’t make the curator less of a hero.

Curation is a powerful yet often undervalued capability. It’s the talent for seeing the swath of ideas already out there and extracting something fresh from them. Spotting themes and patterns, finding new applications for old ideas—these are all real ways of delivering value without creating something new.

The artist may be famous. The curator rarely is. But that doesn’t make the curator less of a hero.

How to curate ideas

So how can you demonstrate curation heroics by repurposing and organizing (rather than producing) ideas to deliver value? Here are some tips.

1. Apply an old solution to a new problem

Agile is a methodology that was developed to streamline and expedite the process of software development. With developers and decision-makers from so many different parts of the company needing to participate in product development, the coordination was often complex, and the process bottlenecked and arduous. The Agile method was designed to overcome these challenges by bringing the right decision-makers together—briefly. outside of their day jobs—to attack the challenges in short coordinated bursts, in turn streamlining the entire process. It worked beautifully.

Old solution repurposed—new idea not necessary. Genius.

So now imagine a different but parallel problem. I once worked with a team tasked with redesigning the new employee onboarding process in a large organization. The project was dragging...

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