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How many great innovations never see the light of day because a single perceived drawback shuts them down? If businesses were more supportive of new ideas, they’d find that some of these drawbacks aren’t as insurmountable as they first appear.

The cult film director Roger Corman, most famous for his 1960s Edgar Allen Poe-inspired movies such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum, had this sage piece of advice for indie filmmakers:

“If you have a $100,000 budget for a movie, write the script as if you had $100 million, then scale back later.”

The idea is that you’ll write a much better script if you don’t let budget considerations stifle your imagination.

This is as true for business entrepreneurs as it is for aspiring filmmakers. How many budding ideas are shut down before they’re allowed to flower into something beautiful because they appear impractical or financially unviable?

Lightbulb moments

The truth of course is we’ll never know. It most likely happens every day. But there are examples of inventions that did make it, despite considerable opposition – and they made it because the person who had the lightbulb moment pushed ahead with the innovation despite what seemed like insurmountable objections.

Curiously enough, this exact thing happened with the actual lightbulb. When Edison patented his invention, it was ridiculed by some of the greatest minds in the field. Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, called it a “conspicuous failure”.

A British parliamentary committee pompously declared it was “unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”

Today, even a child can see the advantages of the lightbulb, so why were so many apparently intelligent and distinguished people against it in 1887?

The infrastructure objection

It wasn’t the idea of the lightbulb they objected to – they could see how something relatively safe and durable that turned electric power into instant light could prove extremely useful. It was because, at the time, there was no way of carrying electricity over long distances – therefore lightbulbs would only be useful if every building (or every city block) had its own electricity generator. That made it a non-starter.

Even Edison didn’t know how to get round this problem initially, but the difference was his attitude: I know the lightbulb is only revolutionary if we work out how to transport electricity over distance, but we will crack that soon, so there’s no reason not to push ahead with perfecting the lightbulb.

Other people’s attitude was that if you can’t transport electricity, it’s pointless developing the lightbulb. Ask yourself who was right.

The financial objection

In my experience, the most frequent objection is not to do with practicality or infrastructure, but with cost. “Interesting idea. How much do you think it will cost? I’m sorry, how much? OK, moving on.”

On the face of it, this might seem a reasonable response, but there are always new materials and sources of supply coming online, as well as adjacent, enabling technologies being developed. These can have a drastic effect on the final cost.

Take the car. The biggest objection when automobiles were introduced was that they’d never be affordable enough to make them a mass market product. Not only did people fail to anticipate mass production techniques, but in 1902 there were serious proposals to make highways out of steel, which would have been ridiculously wasteful, impractical and expensive.

As an idea, the automobile definitely had wheels (so to speak), but while the fact that it was seen as prohibitively expensive may have been an argument against immediately sinking all your money into it, it wasn’t an argument for drawing a line under the discussion completely.

Taking innovation seriously

Of course, not all ideas are great. Some get rejected at the initial discussion stage because the people whose job it is to give the green light just don’t see it.

However, there are many more ideas that do seem good, but which also fall at the first hurdle because they appear impractical, expensive or there is an apparently insurmountable infrastructure problem in the way.

These are the critical moments that distinguish play-it-safe executives and investors from true entrepreneurs. Do you reject a good idea at stage 1 because stage 8 appears impossible, or do you say, “stage 8 appears impossible, but let’s move it to stage 2 and do some research and development anyway, just in case a curtain opens and reveals a better way forward”?

You can always pull the plug at the end of stage 2, or if things are looking brighter, move on to stage 3. If you end it at stage 2 or 3, you’ll have wasted a bit of time and resource. This is often too big a psychological barrier for the executives and investors who lack imagination and want to see a return on every penny.

But true entrepreneurs know that unless you pursue a great idea until you either achieve success or discover for sure that it won’t work, then you’re never going to innovate and get ahead of the pack – and you’re never going to realise a $100 million idea for a $100,000 investment.