The Baldrige Excellence Framework encourages organizations to create an environment for innovation by pursuing intelligent risks. How do you know whether a new idea is an intelligent risk, and therefore worth pursuing? How do you know if the resulting change is an innovation? An experience from my early days as a bench chemist—which involved a creative solution to a leaking sink—shows that not all out-of-the-box ideas are intelligent risks leading to innovation.

In those early days, I had the opportunity to spend considerable time in the Prince William Sound of Alaska conducting environmental sampling to measure how pristine the environment was before the Trans Alaska Oil Pipeline went into operation. The work was challenging because we were developing chemical analysis methods to measure “close to zero” pollution levels. Our base of operations was the town of Valdez, which at that time had no paved runway and no hotels. We rented a rundown, two-story house that was barely fit for habitation and therefore available to visiting scientists.

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