You have had a brilliant idea. You have outlined it to the boss, but she is not so sure and asked you to write a detailed proposal. It took you over two weeks to prepare and now she is sitting on it. Your initial enthusiasm is starting to wane. This is the point when many ideas fail.

Unless you turn your idea into something of 'value' you will have been simply having fun. It's the difference between creativity, which is coming up with ideas and Innovation, which is extracting value from an idea by turning it into reality.

Before you can implement anything you have to overcome three hurdles 

Getting fresh ideas can be quite taxing. Putting them into reality is harder. Business is a logical and systematic process. Once you have the idea, you need to start on the full detail of what you want to achieve and how you are doing to do it. But be careful. Spend too long analysing and paralysis will set in, especially if you are not exactly sure what your idea will look like in reality. So get on with it.

Turning ideas into something of value within an organisation is fraught with difficulties. Your first challenge is to sell the idea. It might seem great to you, but it probably won't to anyone else. Start by sounding out your colleagues and preparing a simple presentation.

Treat the exercise like a game of snakes and ladders - on some days your proposal will move forward on other days it will move backwards. Get yourself a high level sponsor, the higher the better and find what people really think about your idea.

You know what you want, but you'd like some help getting there. Something that will help you find the energy and determination to see it through. You have set up your goal as a Well Formed Outcome but you'd like to give it something extra. The answer is a story-board - Six simple pictorial steps to go from here to there.

Coming up with a new idea is the easy part of the innovation process. Getting it into general usage tends to be much harder. But there is a predictability about it! And there are certain proven characteristics of your idea that will determine how quickly it is adopted and increase the likelihood of implementation. Check your ideas out to see what the future holds.

Our brains can be quite lazy and just love to find patterns in things. Once they have found a way to do something that works, they just keep repeating it. Businesses do it as well, creating procedures and processes to perform their function. Attention is focused forward on the pattern and if something changes in the environment it often gets missed. That's why new companies fresh to a marketplace can often beat the old hands who just do not 'see' what the problem is.