There is a popular theme rising today on the web and in management journals and books: How do we turn knowledge and ideas into action and innovation? I know, that’s a naive statement. It seems like this is everything anyone has been talking about for, well, forever. That could be true.

Before the summer I posted about a book called Making Ideas Happen and a website by the same author: the99percent.com. During the summer I read The Knowing-Doing Gap and I highly recommend it.

So if talk and ideas are cheap than what is of value? If we’re to believe what we’re reading (and watching: here’s an energetic presentation of this), the secret is to just try something. The quicker you can transform an idea into a test, the better. Try something with the understanding that this attempt is just a step in the creative process. Everything can be revised and improved. The groups I work with have a tendency to over think, analyze and engineer. This makes the creative process long and burdened by our assumptions about how things will be received rather than based on the results of small, frequent tests.

So try something. It seems like you’ll be better off doing that than anything else..