If you've been told that you're not qualified, authorized, or entitled to pursue breakthroughs of any kind, you're getting bad advice. Sure, it's fine with me if you cure cancer or build a faster computer chip. Most of us can't wait for R&D to deliver the latest insight. We know that a better ad isn't going to cut it. We need a free prize.

Sometimes it's hard to imagine that there's still room to innovate your product or service. While it seems as if the world is changing faster and faster, that everything that can be done has been done, that's not true.

Every product, service, feature, and benefit is open for improvement. There's nothing that's finished, nothing so complete that it can't carry another free prize. No, not carry a prize . . . be transformed by a prize--transformed so completely that the product category finds new life.

The opportunity here isn't subtle: Whatever you do, wherever you do it, you have the opportunity to create this sort of innovation. You have the power to find and develop a free prize. It's not based on your power in the organization or your desire to become an entrepreneur or how creative you are. So you may be wondering, If this is so effective and productive and requires so little training, why doesn't everyone do it?

Good question.

2. My Boss Won't Let Me! (How To Make Something Happen)

If you decide you want to make something great, more often than not your organization will follow you. And if it doesn't, there are a hundred organizations waiting for you that will. I call the person who makes an innovation happen a champion. And without a champion, nothing happens.

My goal is to sell you on your ability to champion an innovation in your organization. And then to do it again. No free prize lasts forever, which is why it's essential that we get better at making new ones.

Guess what? There's no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it. None. It's not about good ideas. It's about selling those ideas and making them happen. If you're failing to get things done, it's not because your ideas suck. It's because you don't know how to sell them.

The reason for focus groups, market research, and the like is the continuing mirage that somehow, if we do enough work (and work enough hours), we can figure out in advance if something is the right idea or not. After all, organizations believe that if they only knew what the right idea was, they'd do it. But our resistance to ideas has nothing to do with the idea and everything to do with the process. It's clear that all of these focus groups and research are just another hurdle to slow down change.

Without a champion navigating these obstacles, most projects will slow down and eventually stop. Someone who cares too little won't put in the effort to overcome the obstacles; she'll give up and walk away. The forces of mediocrity will band together to water down your innovation. They'll try to make it more popular, easier to understand, easier to build, easier to fit within the existing retail/factory/media business model. Well-meaning folks will water down your edgy idea into something safer, without realizing that their contribution makes the idea riskier. (Riskier? Yes, because now it's less remarkable.)

Champions turn "no" into "yes." Champions understand that the internal sales process is at least as important as the idea itself. Champions are able to bring together all of the elements they need to turn a soft innovation into a free prize, creating a remarkable product that reaches the market and potentially transforms an industry.

If you can do it alone, you probably should. It's not unheard of to create a free prize on your own. If you're a real estate agent, an artist, or a landscape architect, you can probably do something in your business or work that is truly remarkable. The rest of us, though, have to count on other people. We need an organization filled with people, money, and other assets to help make our dreams real. We need their leverage.

To get leverage from your organization, you'll need its willing help. Regardless of what you do and whom you do it with, the steps to generating leverage remain the same. As people consider your idea, they will ask themselves three questions:

1. Is it going to be successful?
2. Is it worth doing?
3. Is this person able to champion the project?

If the answer to any of these questions is a resounding no, it's unlikely your project will happen. Understanding how the three pieces fit together and what to do about them is a big part of choosing the right project and getting it done. Remember, these people don't care one bit about what your answers to these three questions might be. What matters is what they think the answers are, based on the evidence you give them.