Year after year, companies invest huge sums in the development of new ideas. Ideation Workshops, Design Sprints, Brainstorming Sessions, Idea Challenges… the repertoire of tools and instruments for generating ideas is almost inexhaustible.
However, only a minimal fraction of all these ideas are actually pursued. Most die in the same meeting in which they were born. Many more in the days, weeks and months that followed.
The fact of the matter is that ideas are never really bad in themselves – it’s always the context that makes them appear in a bad light. This context can take many forms; wrong target group, different business model, lack of resources, immature or non-existent technology, unconvinced management, politics, etc.
And it’s also a fact that among all these „not so bad“ ideas there are a lot of really good ones to be found – but for the reasons mentioned above, they still don’t manage to get to implementation. These ideas then disappear into the desks, folders, filing cabinets, and computers of the employees who had them. And with them untapped economic potential in the billions2.
What if there was a way to make these potentials not only visible, but also usable?
This is exactly where the Day of the Dead Ideas – Spanish „El Día de las Ideas Muertas“ – comes in.
Based on the Mexican holiday „Día de Muertos“ (Day of the Dead), the aim is to commemorate the defunct ideas with joy instead of forgetting or mourning them. According to ancient Mexican belief, once a year at the end of the harvest season, the dead come to visit from the afterlife and celebrate a joyful reunion with the living with music, dancing and good food. Even the Aztecs did not see death as an end, but as a transitional phase to another form of existence. It is precisely this attitude and way of thinking that can be excellently applied to ideas.