Report 103

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

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Wednesday 5 October 2011
Issue 196

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your twice-monthly (or thereabouts) 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.

 

FIND ME ON TWITTER: @creativeJeffrey

Follow CreativeJeffrey (that’s me!) on Twitter at http://twitter.com/creativeJeffrey.

 

LINK WITH ME ON LINKEDIN

If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I’d be delighted to connect with you too. But unless we have corresponded in the past, let me know you are a Report 103 reader! http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=8967

 

TALK WITH ME ON FACEBOOK

I am posting questions about creativity and innovation on my corporate page on Facebook: “the Wonderful World of Jeffrey Baumgartner” and I would love to have you participate! Just like the page and share your thoughts. I would love to know more about your thinking! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wonderful-World-of-Jeffrey-Baumgartner/123423697738417

 

SELECTING A SOLUTION

Most ideation activities result in the generation of a number of ideas. However, in most cases, only one idea – or a collection of ideas combined into one bigger idea – will actually be implemented. This does not mean that any one of the solutions is actually the right solution. Only that one solution is chosen. Unfortunately, the designers of many an innovation initiative fail to consider this simple fact. As a result, the chosen idea is often not in the best interest of the individual or the organisation running the initiative. Worse, in many cases no idea is ever implemented.

This is why it is important at the very earliest stages of any idea generation activity (be it a local brainstorming session, an anticonventional thinking action, a corporate suggestion scheme or a massive on-line brainstorm using special software – such as ours, see advert below) to decide what kind of ideas you will choose to implement. With this preparation you can do three things:

  1. Define evaluation criteria that can be used to choose the idea or ideas for implementation.

  2. Communicate to brainstormers the kinds of ideas you want.

  3. Prepare mechanisms that facilitate the implementation of the chosen ideas.

Let’s look at each of these points in a little more detail:

Evaluation Criteria

The biggest mistake you can make in any idea generation exercise is to select ideas based on votes for the “best idea”. As we have seen in the past, research has shown that voting in on-line suggestion schemes, ideas campaigns or any similar system is counter-productive. Voting merely identifies the first popular ideas submitted to the system and often hides the most creative and original ideas.

The second biggest mistake you can make is simply to decide to select the best idea. “Best” is a vague word. In any social group, whether it be a team, a company or a government institution, “best” would typically connotate an idea that most conforms to the group’s norms. For instance, if your office is furnished with Ikea furniture, the best office chair will be a nice Ikea chair or at least one that looks like an Ikea chair and fits the Ikea style of your office.

Compare that with the most comfortable chair, the most durable chair or the most original chair. If any of these were your criteria for chair selection, your choice would be different to your “best” choice and, ironically, would prove to be a better choice than the best choice in terms of meeting your criteria!

Another consideration to make is that ideas that at first seem outlandish may well prove to be potentially the most innovative. Nevertheless, their initial outlandishness makes them likely to be rejected by someone simply choosing the best ideas. By comparing ideas to a good criteria set, seemingly outlandish ideas may reveal themselves to be rich in potential value and hence likely innovations.

As an example of this, I like to imagine a team, in the pre-bottled water era, who are brainstorming ideas for a new soft drink. People suggest ideas like drinks with a hint of lemon, drinks tasting of exotic fruit and so on. But one person suggests: “how about if we put tap water in a bottle and sell it at the same price as we sell our existing soft drinks?” Most people would reject such an idea as silly. “Who would pay for tap water?” However, if you were to compare the idea to criteria, such as profit potential, ease of manufacture, fit with existing products and low risk, bottled water would immediately be revealed to be an excellent idea.

So, the key lesson here is that if you want to innovate, avoid the term “best” like the plague!

Communicate to Brainstormers

Whether you are running a small brainstorm session in a room or a massive on-line brainstorm involving everyone in your company, communicating the kind of ideas you want will help them focus on relevant ideas. Some people will argue that this is not a good strategy because it may restrict the brainstormers’ thinking. I would argue that it focuses thinking. Moreover, there are many things you can tell brainstormers. It may not be necessary to give detailed engineering specifications when you are looking at redesigning an electronic product. But you can communicate that you are specifically looking for ways to reduce the size of the product so it can fit easily into a pocket.

This kind of information may result in fewer ideas, but it should result in a greater number of relevant ideas. And remember, the aim of any idea generating and development exercise is not get as many ideas as possible. Rather it is to generate ideas you need to solve a specific problem.

In my anticonventional thinking approach (see http://www.creativejeffrey.com/act/): if you are looking for creative ideas, tell brainstormers that you specifically want creative ideas; or you can use terms like “outrageous”, “outlandish”, “unusual”, “unique”, “crazy” and so on. Words like these encourage brainstormers to reject conventional ideas and push for unconventional ideas. Again,this results in fewer ideas, but a much higher level of creativity.

Prepare Implementation Mechanisms

A classic problem with many brainstorming activities, especially those that generate truly novel ideas, is that those novel ideas are often not implemented. This is because a lot of effort goes into encouraging creativity as well as managing software and brainstormers, but little thought goes into what will happen after the ideas are generated.

If you hope and anticipate that a brainstorm will result in very creative ideas which you hope will go on to become breakthrough innovations, you probably need to think about how those ideas will be implemented. In particular, what bottlenecks can you anticipate? Is your company plagued by review committees that are adverse to risk like cats are to water? Is your company the kind where people talk about ideas in an endless stream of meetings but no one is willing to take responsibility for approving an idea? Does your company have strict purchasing rules that might make unusual ideas difficult to put forward?

Thinking in advance about these potential bottlenecks and preparing mechanisms that will facilitate the implementation of ideas can save you and the brainstormers a lot of headaches later. Sure, you can wait until the ideas are generated before trying to work out the bottlenecks and pushing the ideas through. But this takes time and during that time, those responsible for ideas may well lose interest. Being able to push ideas from conception to implementation quickly ensures people maintain enthusiasm.

Moreover, by identifying bottlenecks and developing methods to deal with them, you will gain knowledge that can be used in the evaluation and development of ideas. For instance, learning that purchasing services is easier for invoices of under €10,000 allows you to design implementation plans that aim to keep invoices at that level. Knowing that ideas need to be reviewed by a committee that is having a meeting at a particular time allows you to plan the timing of your own activities.

Anticipating Ideas

Of course you cannot know in advance exactly what ideas will come out of a brainstorm, but you can have a reasonably clear image of the kind of ideas that will result. If this is not possible, I would suggest that your brainstorm challenge (or anticonventional thinking provocation) is too broad.

By knowing the kind of ideas you expect to get, you can easily plan evaluation criteria, communicate key information to brainstormers and prepare implementation procedures. This can only result in a smooth running brainstorming action in which you generate the kind of ideas you need and see them through to implementation.

 

THE WAY OF THE INNOVATION MASTER
Everything You Need to Know about Setting Up an Innovation Process in Your Company

If you are responsible for innovation in your company, then my book: The Way of the Innovation Master is just what you need. Written in the same informal style I use in Report 103, The Way combines a narrative, a dialogue and a series of lessons that enable you to become an innovation master and lead your company on a path to continuing success!

More information and links to buy on-line can be found at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/books/

 

VISUALISING INNOVATION ECO-SYSTEMS

By Simon Evans

How do we look at the big picture of Innovation?

There are many different models of innovation out there, and they all have their respective merits and challenge our thinking in different ways. In this (hopefully) post recession world however it is time that we take another look at how we are all looking at and thinking about our innovation capability. There is a common perception that innovation is getting harder (see any of the recent Boston Consulting papers for example), and that our “freedoms to innovate” feel like they have been curtailed. Our successful approaches in the past may no longer be good enough in this new world – unless we refresh out thinking there is a danger that we will end up stuck in the past trying to repeat those successes.

Innovation, as we all know, is not about a single magic formula, or a process that we can just implement and succeed. It is instead a complex environment of subtle influences and capabilities which will vary wildly from place to place dependant on the emergent situation. It is also very delicate– it takes little to upset it and prevent it from working well.

In this paper I would like to explore how we might describe innovation as an eco-system that supports and nurtures our ideas and extracts the maximum value from them. Maybe we can gain some insights and regain our big picture understanding of what factors make innovation a success in today’s world.

Why an Eco-System?

The term “Eco-System” has been used by a number of people in the past, but came into focus for us at InnovoFlow when it was suggested by a workshop client. When asked, "what message will you take home from the workshop?" his answer was "I like the way there is a holistic overview of all the things that make innovation happen - it's like an eco-system of inter-dependant habitats". This was spot on - we can imagine an effective innovation space as having different zones of activity - habitats if you like, filled with all the nutrients, symbiots, life-forms and substrates (as well as a few predators), that are needed to make a healthy and successful eco-system.

By following this model we can start to help people know what goes where and understand why it is needed and if anything is missing. We can also help them understand when the eco-system needs to adapt or change, and give them the tools to construct an adaptive, functional architecture that is a reflection of the current opportunity they face and the resources they can afford - we must remember there are no free lunches, only lunches that meet the needs and pockets of the diners.

Populating the Innovation Eco-system

Let's imagine that our innovation eco-system has 4 habitats or zones as follows:

Creativity - those things that inspire and generate ideas and allow us  to identify those ideas with greatest potential.

Development - The activities which tend to add potential value to our idea and make it into something real. Without this zone we would just have a pile of useless things that will soon be forgotten.

Value Realisation - once our ideas have been validated and built into a real offering, it is time to release that pent up value and make the idea do some work! Some form of value generation is what it is all about, of course ,and so this activity is critical to our ongoing success, without it we may as well not bother having and developing ideas.

Leadership - or perhaps we should term it Gardening? Those activities that nurture the innovation eco-system and keep it healthy so that the other three zones can do their work of processing ideas quickly and with the greatest possible value add.

So what sort of activities could we place in these zones to populate them? We must be realistic. Scarcity of resources will not allow us to introduce everything we want, but each habitat/zone must have sufficient processes and activities to ensure that ideas are created, developed and then value generated within the most efficient framework possible.  It is important to remember at this point that ideas cannot exist in a vacuum - as Alfred North Whitehead observed, "Ideas won't keep.  Something must be done about them". In this model it means that at all times, your ideas must be supported by one process or another within the eco-system zone. Without this, the ideas will wither away in the breeze. We can picture our ideas being born in the creative zone, and then moving through the various habitats while a variety of processes add value and solidity to them.  Maintaining the balance within and between the zones is the key to efficiency and innovation velocity (as measured by the rate of flow of good ideas through the system).

Some things are obvious.  In the Creative habitat we should not be surprised to see a selection of processes such as idea management systems, crowdsourcing, open innovation, or unlearning. But what of "softer" things like courage, finding the non-conformists or allowing time to pursue personal projects?  Similarly considering our Development habitat, obvious things like development teams, joint ventures and open source developments may spring to mind, to which we can add less concrete things like diversity, rainmakers or maybe the value of taking a walk in the woods.  Leadership processes might include a management team willing to adopt new ideas, luck (self made), innovation strategies, the impact of working environments or knowledge sharing.

The Importance of Visualisation

To stop the analysis simply becoming shopping list of things that you want to do, it is important to physically populate the eco-system habitats on paper or a board so it becomes a very visual and you can start to map out the pathways your new ideas might take through the eco-system. It also becomes painfully obvious where you are missing capability or resources and so you are less likely to have a nasty shock as your idea gets stuck somewhere unexpected.

At the very least, this approach makes it clear that a huge variety of different factors are at play here and that keeping your innovation eco-system healthy is not just a matter of training people to brainstorm, setting up an innovation initiative and installing an idea management system (however valuable that tool might be!).

When using the model it is important that whole end-to-end life-cycle of the ideas is represented and clearly visible so that each step can be supported in a deliberate way, with sufficient resources so that the required activities actually work in the environment. If this is done well, then not only will the innovation capability will be more coherent and efficient, but also there is a good chance you will find it much easier to argue the case for funding as the processes that drive the returns are considered with the same weight as those activities which generate the ideas in the first place!

Summary

The eco-system approach to innovation can be summarised as follows:

  • Visualise your innovation space as consisting of creative, development, value realisation and leadership zones

  • Ensure that each of these zones is populated with a variety of "things" (processes, people, skills, philosophies, events, architectures, strategies etc.) sufficient to meet your current challenge effectively and within any resource constraints. Ensure that as much attention is applied to the value realisation zone as the creative zone (which of course is very sexy and is where a lot of the fun is).

  • Imagine your ideas appearing in the creative zone and moving across the the other zones.  Ask yourself what do you need to do at each stage to maximise the flow of ideas and the potential value that is added to them

  • Be prepared to have multiple eco-systems - one size approach does not fit all situations within your organisation.

  • Be adaptive - be an agile innovation leader! Continuously remodel the eco-system as needed to keep up with emergent trends. Be aware of the need to change approach, have the freedom to innovate - don't be constrained by the way things have always been done.

  • Practice these skills routinely so your thinking is always being challenged. Test your model and see what might happen if you introduced some new thinking.

  • Have fun - innovation should be fun, engaging and exciting and involve everyone in some way - we are all sharing the same eco-system after all!

"If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got"  Albert Einstein

About Simon Evans

Together with Victor Newman, Simon formed InnovoFlow Ltd in 2009 with the objective of providing organisations a different approach to thinking about innovation. With a background of 18 years innovative thinking in the global pharmaceutical industry Simon has much practical experience of developing novel services. To help drive the development of agile innovation leadership, Simon has been developing InnovoZone, the Innovation Game ™ which is giving great insight into the way organisations think about innovation. Simon also has long standing interests in the governance and strategy behind successful corporate intranets through his consultancy business, EnigmaQuest Ltd.

Contact: simon@innovoflow.co.uk
Web: http://www.innovoflow.co.uk

 

HIRE JEFFREY!

It has been a busy couple of months which have seen me travelling in Africa and Europe to participate in the South Africa Innovation Summit, the European Conference on Creativity and Innovation as well as corporate events. I’ve talked about open innovation, have demonstrated anticonventional thinking (http://www.creativejeffrey.com/act/) and even talked about how to do a creative workshop!

If you are planning a corporate event, where you need an energetic keynote speaker, if you want to train your teams to learn how to think like creative geniuses, if you need someone who can run a creative event – send an email to jeffreyb@jpb.com or call +32 2 305 6591 / +32 478 549 428 and let me know what you want!

If you just want ideas, give me a call. A week ago, a chap from a global financial company needed quick ideas to solve a collaboration problem. I gave him a solution within minutes.

 

WORLD INNOVATION DIVERSITY INDEX

Artes Calculi World Innovation Diversity Index (AC WIDI), which has just been published, measures national diversity of the world innovation dynamics.

It is based on data provided by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) – the number of patent filings in the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) system. WIPO publishes this data monthly, sorted by countries and past data is available all the way back to the year 1985.

The Index includes all countries worldwide. The number of patent filings is averaged on a yearly basis to correct for seasonal effects. The modified Gini method for measuring statistical dispersion is then used to calculate the index. The result – given on a scale from 0 to 100 – measures national diversity of the world innovation dynamics.

The value of the index for Q2/2011 is 15.4410.

This value indicates that there is a significant room for improvement towards more innovative society. Counting PCT filings, many countries contribute far less than expected when their population and human resources and potential are taken into account. Not surprisingly, many
countries with a large number of PCT filings per capita are highly developed and yield significant economic power - we call them the Tier 1 countries. The Tier 1 countries for Q2/2011 (sorted by the number of PCT applications per capita) are: Estonia, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, France, Singapore, Norway, Austria, United States of America, Israel, Republic of Korea, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. In order to minimize the effects of possible statistical fluctuations, Tier 1 list does not include countries with less than 1 million residents.

It is interesting to note that China is not among the Tier 1 countries – however, it is positioned on the top of the Tier 2 list and, considering the data from the past decade, was the fastest growing country and one of the main reasons for the growth of the index in the period of 2001-2011.

"WIDI index was developed during our market research activities here at Artes Calculi Ltd. It helps us track global innovation dynamics and trends, feeling the pulse of the economies worldwide. During the last decade we witnessed considerable shift in global state-of-the-art creation dynamics, with China gaining a serious momentum. Consistent rise of the index clearly demonstrates the progress of globalization process and the drive of emerging and developing countries to become global players," says Hrvoje Abraham, Managing Director at Artes Calculi Ltd.

You can download a PDF summary of the research together with charts at http://www.artcalc.com/ac-content/ac_widi_news_release_q2_2011.pdf

About Artes Calculi

Artes Calculi Ltd. is a software engineering company based in Croatia which specializes in CAE (Computer Aided Engineering), off the shelf software solutions and in custom solutions in the field of numerical analysis. To learn more, visit www.artcalc.com, call +385 1 4552-943 or send an
e-mail message to info@artcalc.com.

 

CREATIVITY, THE OLDEST SCHOOL SUBJECT?

At a Cambridge University conference on the archaeology of childhood, an interesting hypothesis was shared: that stone-age children may have attended a kind of school where they had art lessons. Archaeologists have known for a while that prehistoric children were using finger paint to express themselves. However, new evidence suggests that children may actually have had a form of group training in painting.

If this is true, it would suggest that one of the first things our prehistoric ancestors felt worthy of teaching their young was how to express themselves creatively. Perhaps it was already a sense of recognition that creativity and the ability to create things separated humans from animals.

Read more about this interesting research in the Guardian...

 

THE MYTH OF COMMON SENSE

Because collaborative creativity and innovation is a social activity, a lot of assumptions are made based on common sense. The individual often assumes “if I feel this way, then everyone must feel similarly, so it must be true.” But, as any scientist worth her salt can tell you, a random sampling of one is hardly statistically useful!

Although not directly about creativity and innovation, this article on common sense is a must read for anyone interested in the field. The Myth of Common Sense: Why The Social World Is Less Obvious Than It Seems.

 

JENNI IDEA MANAGEMENT

If you are looking for an easy to use, enterprise idea management software solution that can facilitate massive on-line brainstorms, allow your managers to control who participates in which brainstorm and provides the industry’s best suite of evaluation tools, take a look at Jenni innovation process management software. I am sure it will meet your needs and more! After all, I designed it myself (but better programmers

In North and South America: http://www.jenniusa.net/
Elsewhere in the world: http://www.creativejeffrey.com/jenni/

 

ARCHIVES

You can find this and every issue of Report 103 ever written at our archives on http://www.creativejeffrey.com/report103/


Happy thinking!

Jeffrey Baumgartner

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Report 103 is a complimentary eJournal from Bwiti bvba of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.creativejeffrey.com). Archives and subscription information can be found at http://www.creativejeffrey.com/report103/

Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on a monthly basis.

You may forward this copy of Report 103 to anyone, provided you forward it in its entirety and do not edit it in any way. If you wish to reprint only a part of Report 103, please contact Jeffrey Baumgartner.

Contributions and press releases are welcome. Please contact Jeffrey in the first instance.

 

 

 


 

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Jeffrey Baumgartner
Bwiti bvba

Erps-Kwerps (near Leuven & Brussels) Belgium

 

 


 

My other web projects

My other web projects

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