There are some good prescriptive ideas in this article about how to avoid "iteration-itis." However, any leadership that implores their employees to give them

There are some good prescriptive ideas in this article about how to avoid "iteration-itis." However, any leadership that implores their employees to give them more 'raw' ideas needs to be prepared to actually act on it. I was once in an organization that identified this problem and did the "science fair" equivalent (we actually called it "Hack Day"), and the whole company launched into it with a fervor. It was incredibly rewarding and exciting to work on our out of the box ideas and present our various visions of the future of the company to the highest level executives. They reacted incredibly pleased, talked constantly about making sure some of these ideas would become reality... and then... nothing. We had a down quarter in revenue/profit so it was back to squeezing juice from the lemon. It's common for employees to joke about management dysfunction, but whenever that Hack Day was brought up, it's pointlessness wasn't just joked about but attacked with bitterness even months and months later. I realized that when we pitched ideas that had gone through iteration-itis, it the process ended up tempering our own expectations as well, so by the time we pitched to the execs, our emotional investment had been whittled down to mostly nothing. But doing this -- asking us for our unfiltered ideas and thus, our unfiltered enthusiasm, and then not acting on them -- was probably the worst thing they could have done to destroy morale aside from layoffs.