Don't abandon ideas that flop

Just minutes into its first screening, the 2003 drama “The Room” began eliciting laughter. Soon, people in the audience were “peeing in their pants,” says a cast member who attended the premiere. It was a complete flop – in some people’s view one of the worst movies ever made. So why is it still playing, nearly seven years later?

Because it was a “false negative,” to use author Henry Chesbrough’s term. It was one of those unpromising innovations that turn out, for unexpected reasons, to be great.

Most of the time these ideas vanish forever – even if someone happens to remember them, they’re tainted by failure.

But “all ideas have value,” as Jacksonville University's William Townsend writes in a recent issue of the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research. Even the outliers.

Both Townsend and Chesbrough are concerned about the same issue: preventing old ideas from disappearing.

Chesbrough, an influential researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has written and spoken a lot about this problem. In a 2004 article, “Managing Open Innovation,” in Research Technology Management, he suggests that after terminating a project, a company should carefully watch to see what happens to it.

Do developers and customers simply move on, or is there evidence of continuing interest? He suggests that companies build a tracking system. If a terminated project continues to show signs of life, reassess its potential.

Tommy Wiseau – the writer, director and star of “The Room” – did just that. He noticed that people thought his movie, which ends with the hero’s suicide, was funny. Very funny. So he added a line to the film’s ads: “Experience this quirky new black comedy, it’s a riot!” The line was oddly off-key, like everything else about the movie, from the peculiar dialogue to the throwaway subplots to Wiseau’s inky black, shoulder-length hair.

Wiseau may be unclear about why people find his movie hilarious. But he ultimately understands, to quote Townsend, that a product’s “valuation is a function of a consuming group’s assessment of utility and not that of the producing organization.”

Often, Townsend suggests, an idea is simply ahead of its time. Companies should regularly revisit their discarded innovations to see whether the rest of the world might have caught up, just as the world is catching up to the sublime qualities of “The Room.”

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate