"Apprentice" and Innovation

I watched "Apprentice" tonight by chance. Today's project was to make a new kitchen detergent. I don't mean their work are innovative, but it seemed to me that  the process of judging their products was interesting in terms of innovation, because they were completely refused at all!! It's almost sure that they somehow looked absolutely ridiculous, but how could we recognise truly stupid ideas and innovative but apparently absurd ideas?

If you assume that we cannot distinguish them, all we can do is to test them with as little risk as we can, or can logic lead us to right answers? Obviously, there are lots of hidden agenda in projects in the program, therefore it could be quite easy to mislead the projects, and their outputs doesn't have to be innovative, so arguing about innovation on that program is a bit wrong way, but still it seems to imply problems in project management and norms against innovation.