Report 103

A fortnightly newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

Tuesday, 17 May 2005
Issue 58

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your weekly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.


POSITIVE MOTIVATION VS. NEGATIVE MOTIVATION

A friend of mine divorced his wife a few years ago. There were a number of incompatibility problems. Since Jeremy is my friend, I understand the problem from his perspective. Doubtless friends of his ex-wife would see things differently.

Jeremy's greatest frustration was that no matter what he did, his wife seemed always to be angry with him and scolded him in great detail. Even when he tried to do good things, she'd find something to complain about. For example, if he cleaned the house, she'd say he was trying to make her look lazy. If he bought her flowers, they would be the wrong kind or fewer in number than she believed he had given his previous girlfriends.

When Jeremy started going with her, his actions were motivated by a desire to please her – as is normal when people date. After they got married and things went downhill, his actions became motivated by a desire to minimise the scolding. In other words, instead of trying to make her happy, he was simply trying to prevent her from being overly angry. Later, his motivation was about an exit strategy. When she walked out on him one day, he changed the locks on the doors of the house.

While this is the story of one man in a bad relationship, there is much managers can learn about motivating staff to be innovative. Doubtless, you are familiar with the insecure type of boss who micromanages projects, picks out every weakness in their staff's work, never gives complements, criticises staff in front of others and otherwise demonstrates her superiority by making everyone else feel small.

Staff working under such a boss will, like Jeremy, be motivated to minimise criticism from their boss rather than to try and impress her. They will have learned that the boss cannot be impressed. She can only complain. Anything that can minimise that complaining improves the working environment for the staff. That usually means follow directions closely and do not deviate. In other word, don't bother to innovate, your ideas will be met with harsh words.

Compare such bosses with those who compliment good work, let staff micromanage their own projects, finds and builds upon the strength of each employee and praises staff in front of others. Staff with such a boss will be more motivated to please her and live up to an beyond her compliments.

Staff will also be freer to innovate knowing that good new ideas will be met with praise and implementation, while ideas that do not work will not lead to censure or worse.

Doubtless you are like that latter boss, who supports and compliments her staff. Nevertheless, praise your staff today. It may be one of the most empowering things you do today.


SUPERTRADE KNOWLEDGE EXCHANGE

We've just finished off the beta of a new on-line knowledge exchange tool called “SuperTrade” because it is at http://www.supertrade.com/. Supertrade is a very simple tool designed to help you set up directories of links to web sites, on-line documents and anything else on the web. It allows you to save links and remarks about those links as well as to start on-line discussions about those links.

SuperTrade is rather like a mini knowledge management tool in that it you can use it to create and share collections of links on specific topics. Moreover, your SuperTrade list (page of links, remarks and discussion) can be accessed from anywhere you have an Internet connection.

SuperTrade is free and the basic format will always remain free – albeit with advertising in the near future. You can try out the beta version now at http://www.supertrade.com/ - and let me know how we can improve it.


ALTERNATIVE USES OF YOUR PRODUCTS

If you manufacture or distribute products, you probably have very clear ideas about how your products are used. However, the chances are, you are only partially right.

We human beings are great improvisers, especially when it can save us time. A classic example is the person who needs to reach something on top of a tall bookcase. She has the choice of running off to fetch a ladder or she can grab the nearest chair. Chairs also frequently function as coat racks (with jackets draped over their backs) and occasionally as locks (jammed under a doorknob to prevent a door being opened) and even weapons (smashed over someone's head). For a child, a chair can be the seat of an imaginary racing car or rocket. Yet, few chair designers consider these alternative uses when creating new designs. As a result, they are missing out on some interesting marketing opportunities.

Clearly, it would benefit you to know different ways people use your products. Fortunately, this is a relatively easy thing to do. An ideas campaign (for more information about ideas campaigns, see http://www.creativejeffrey.com/creative/ideascampaign.php) among your staff and customers should reveal all kinds of alternative uses for your products. And in order to maximise the creativity of your results, you should also invite people to contribute extreme ideas about how they could use your products.

There are three advantages to this exercise. The first and most obvious advantage is that you may discover new markets and ways to market your products. A chair designer, for instance, might make a combination chair-mini-step-ladder for kitchens.

The second advantage is you might discover that with simple modifications, your product could target a new market or might simply become far more appealing to an existing market. For example, a children's chair with a detachable toy control panel would give your children's chairs a competitive edge over the competitions' for sitting-only chairs.

The third advantage is a bit more obscure, but could help you prevent your customers injuring themselves or worse – which can also save your firm from expensive and reputation damaging law suits. If people make product suggestions which are not only unsuitable for your product, but are also dangerous, you can provide product warnings on your packaging which can help prevent customers from injuring themselves and reduce your liability in the event customers do not read the warning labels.

To a lesser extent, service providers can also run an ideas campaign for new product ideas. In this case, you should solicit and capture ideas on what new services you could offer your customers based on your teams' combined skill-set and your customers' needs. If you run a creative thinking consulting service, you could easily offer training services, coaching services, detailed reports and other services. Less obviously, you might do a television or radio series on creativity, design and market toys that help people be more creative or develop and patent your own creative ideas in order to resell them.

Finding new uses for successful products and services can clearly increase your market size and, as a result, sales. Finding new uses for unsuccessful products and services, on the other hand, can turn a dud into a winner of a product.

Commercial: If you require a tool that will help you successfully manage an ideas campaign, Jenni Idea Management should do the trick. Jenni is available as a long term complete idea management solution or as a short term rental for a single ideas campaign. See http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/.


DENNIS MYKOLS: NEW US SALES PARTNER

Earlier this month we formed a partnership with Mykols Group L.L.C., an independent Sales Representative firm based in Michigan, USA and owned by Dennis Mykols. The Mykols Group has formed Idea Management Solutions which will sell Jenni idea management virtual software (http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/) in the Mid-Western USA.

Dennis is also a great guy with an interesting background and kilowatts of energy. You can read about him at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/about/dennis.php. Contact information is also there.


KNOWLEDGE MAPS

A knowledge map is an interesting idea with many applications to idea management and innovatising [my own word] your company. A knowledge map does not provide knowledge, rather it provides a map that shows users where knowledge exists. In particular, it lists people, their locations and their expertises. It can also list resources, such as web sites, documents and other sources of information in the company together with locations. But our interest is people.

Being able to identify people with particular expertise is incredibly useful for evaluating new ideas, pre-implementing ideas (in other words, activities like writing a business case, building a prototype or setting up a small scale trial, to name but a few) and participating in creative teams.

Knowledge mapping can be particularly useful when innovative new ideas take your company into new sectors or new markets.

In order to draw up a knowledge map of expertise, it is important to get people to list their own areas of expertise, whether related to work or not. For example, if your Financial Manager is a keen cook and amateur astronomer, she should include these expertises in her assessment. Likewise, close colleagues should also provide assessment. We sometimes do not recognise all of our strengths – and sometimes believe our strengths are greater than others perceive them to be. A classic example of this is the guy who thinks he is a computer wizard, but in fact knows little more than the average user.

The knowledge map should be saved to a database or put into a directory - organised by expertise rather than person – which is available to everyone.

That way, the next time, you want to put together a diversified creative team, you can ensure a truly wide range of expertise.


IMAGINATION CLUB

In the last issue, I mentioned establishing an imagination club. The purpose of the club would simply be to bring together a group of people who like to stretch their imaginations by playing with ideas, devising creative solutions to hypothetical problems, dreaming up outlandish inventions and so on. The Imagination Club would be a place to be creative rather than a place to talk about and analyse creativity and innovation.

There has been enough interest to set up an imagination club on a small scale to start with. I will keep all of you who responded in touch with the details. If you are interested and have not contacted me, please do so. In the meantime...


Happy thinking

Jeffrey Baumgartner


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Jeffrey Baumgartner
Bwiti bvba

Erps-Kwerps (near Leuven & Brussels) Belgium

 

 


 

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CreativeJeffrey.com: 100s of articles, videos and cartoons on creativity   Jeffosophy.com - possibly useful things I have learned over the years.   Kwerps.com: reflections on international living and travel.   Ungodly.com - paintings, drawings, photographs and cartoons by Jeffrey