Report 103

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

Wednesday 15 February 2012
Issue 203

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.

INTERACT WITH JEFFREY

I am on the social networks and would love to connect with you there.

Facebook
Join me on my professional page on Facebook –

LinkedIn
You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

Twitter
And you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @creativejeffrey

LET’S GET CREATIVE: BORING PROBLEMS VIDEO

I’ve started a series of short video talks on creativity, called “Let’s Get Creative” The first is on-line and it’s called “Boring Problems”. You can watch it here on jpb.com or on YouTube.

I plan to do a series of such videos. You can watch for them here, on jpb.com or on the social media above.

INNOVATION IS A TOOL

How often do you purchase products primarily because the firms selling those products claim to be highly innovative? Probably never. You may very well have bought certain products that were highly desirable or even essential because of the innovation behind those products, but it is unlikely that the innovation itself was the key selling factor. Rather, it was the result of the innovation that was compelling.

Innovation and Cameras

In fact, innovation has become to business what cameras are to photographers: a tool that gets more attention than it needs. Whenever a couple of photographers get together, they almost inevitably talk about cameras. Amateur photographers will strive to collect a great kit of shiny new cameras, lenses and other equipment. Yet, the camera does not make the photographer. David Bailey was not the seminal fashion photographer of the 60s and 70s because he used Olympus cameras. In fact, Olympus gave the already great photographer free equipment as a marketing action. Elliot Erwit’s charming images owe nothing to his Nikons and Leicas and everything to his sense of humour and keen photographer’s eye.

Nevertheless, cameras are important. A professional photographer needs durable camera bodies, quality optics and other specialised equipment depending on her needs. But whether that camera is a Nikon, a Canon or another brand makes little difference. Whether the flash units used to light a model are Metz or Sunpak matters not at all. Vogue magazine does not hire photographers based on their kit, but rather based on their portfolios and reputations.

What matters is how photographers use that equipment to produce their images – not the equipment that they use.

Merely Tools

The same is true of innovation. It is merely a tool that enables you to achieve your company’s strategic aim. Your customers do not buy from you because the word “innovate” and its derivatives (“innovative”, “innovation”, etc) appear on your home page 27 times. Rather, they buy your product because of the way you use innovation to make your product better than your competitors’ products in one or more ways.

Think about it..

Can you imagine someone telling you, “I use Dash laundry detergent because of Proctor and Gamble’s wonderful open innovation initiative”? Probably not. I doubt that anyone purchases Dash for this reason. Rather they buy Dash because they believe it will clean their clothes better than a competing product. Certainly, Proctor and Gamble’s open innovation initiative may well have contributed to making Dash into a superior product. But it is the results of the initiative and not the initiative that make the product compelling (Disclaimer: I don’t use Dash myself, so I honestly do not know how good it is!)

How many purchasing managers do you think have chosen IBM mainframe computers, over the competitions’ mainframes, simply because IBM regularly holds idea jams that generate tens of thousands of ideas? I do not know, but would guess the answer is very, very close to zero. However, some of the ideas generated during the idea jams may well be a factor in making IBM’s mainframes a more desirable purchase for many a buyer.

It Is Not How Innovative You Are

This is an absolutely critical fact to bear in mind: no one, not a single person, will ever buy your products or services because they are intrinsically more innovative than another company’s or because your company generates more ideas in your suggestion scheme or because you use the word “innovative” in your company slogan. However, they may buy your products and services owing to the results of your innovation initiative. And that is a huge difference.

This means that if you are focusing too much on innovation for innovation’s sake – and that seems to be a trend these days – you need to change your processes and focus on innovation as a tool to achieve the strategic objectives of your company. (See also “Innovation Versus Vision”: http://www.creativejeffrey.com/creative/vision.php

If your company’s strategy is to manufacture the most technologically sophisticated alarm clocks on the planet, then you need to innovate. You need a strong research and development team who can monitor, develop and implement cutting edge alarm clock technology to ensure that you remain the sector leader. And if they succeed, your customers will continue to pay a premium for your cutting edge clocks. But, innovation is not the only tool you’ll need. You will also need to communicate to your employees, your suppliers, your shareholders, your customers and your potential customers that you produce the highest of high tech alarm clocks. You will need to hire employees who can help you achieve this strategic aim. You will need to find suppliers who can provide you with the quality parts you need. .

So, remember: no one will ever buy from you because of how innovative you are. Rather, they buy from you because of how you innovate.

GET CREATIVE WITH JEFFREY

If you have learned something from the articles in Report 103, imagine how you much you and your colleagues could gain from one of my focused, interactive workshops.

If you have been inspired by something I’ve written, imagine how inspiring it would be to have me speak of it at your conference or seminar.

If you are impressed with my understanding of the creative process, imagine the results we could get in an anticonventional thinking session that I facilitate especially to meet your needs.

To learn more about my services and see a couple of video clips (more coming), please visit the Services pages on jpb.com – or contact me to discuss your needs.

THE COGNITIVE CONSEQUENCES OF INTERNET INFORMATION

Here is a quick question for you: do any countries have flags of just one colour?

What did you immediately think about when I asked you that question? If you are like most people today, you probably didn’t think about flags. You probably thought about your computer or Google or Wikipedia. This, according to Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner, is an example of “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” which is also the title of their thought-provoking new research paper.

They have set out to demonstrate that, thanks to the availability of the Internet and particularly the web with its wealth of readily available data indexed by Google, Bing and other search engines, humans are changing the way that they remember things. Rather than remembering information, people are remembering where and how to find information.

The question I asked you earlier is an example of this. The researchers would argue that had I asked you the same question a generation ago, flags would be the first thing you thought about as you tried to remember your old school books on geography.

We Don’t Remember Information – We Remember How to Find It

This is fascinating and arguably provides great value. For the first time ever, we (at least those of us in developed countries or emerging economies with wide-spread Internet access) have an inconceivably great wealth of information available at our fingertips. To that extent, it is a good thing that our brains have learned how to find information quickly. In a sense, this technological change combined with our memory change has greatly enhanced the recall potential of everyone.

The downside to this change would seem to be that people today have less actual information in stored in their brains. Provided the web is readily available, we are fine. But if we are without access to this information, we are screwed. Over the years, there have been several stories written about people travelling to the past and using their superior contemporary knowledge to thrive. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain, is an early example of this genre. However, if the average person today found herself transported back into the middle ages, she’d probably find she had little useful knowledge. Indeed, would you know how to create an electrical generator, the internal combustion engine, a steam engine, a radio? Indeed, would you even know how to find food? For most of us, the answer is that we do not have this knowledge. We merely have the knowledge of where to find the actual knowledge. But if the web is not available to us, that does little good.

Creative Implications

These findings have some interesting implications with respect to creative thinking. From a neurological point of view, creativity seems to be a process of the mind searching out and piecing together disparate bits of information, in other words: memories, in various ways in order to try and solve problems. Highly creative people seem to search across more diverse information, and hence a wider range of memories, than do averagely creative people. Hence, highly creative people make more unusual and unexpected connections which result in their unique ideas.

However, if our minds retain less information (in order to retain more information about how to find information), will this result in reduced creativity over time?

Or might the very nature of creativity change? Will our creative children and grandchildren not seek only in their minds for ideas, but might they seek across computer networks in some fanciful ways in order to find data that might become the basis of creative ideas?

Or will creative minds simply be better at storing disparate bits of information as raw material for the imagination.

We may just have to wait a generation or two in order to see the answer to this question. But it will be interesting!

Reference

“Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips”
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner; Science 5 August 2011: 333 (6043), 776-778.Published online 14 July 2011 [DOI:10.1126/science.1207745]

THE WAY OF THE INNOVATION MASTER

If you enjoy Report 103, you’ll love my book The Way of the Innovation Master, which explains everything you need to know in order to launch an innovation initiative in your company. Not only is it a great read, but it makes for a wonderful Christmas present! Learn more and order yours in print or digital versions here – or ask for it at your favourite bookshop.

INTERESTING ON THE WEB

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve run across a couple of articles on the web that I have found interesting and would like to share with you.

The Dark Side of Creativity

Before you go boasting too much about how creative you are, you should bear in mind that there is a cost to pay for a creative mind and that cost is not necessarily very nice. “Creative individuals are more likely to be arrogant, good liars, distrustful, dishonest and maybe just a little crazy—OK, let's say eccentric,” says Jeremy Dean. And this is not the opinion of a jealous, non-creative person. These unpleasant characteristics are largely demonstrated through empirical evidence. Read more at

http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/02/the-dark-side-of-creativity.php

Less is More When It Comes to the Brain

In today’s business world, we are constantly being pressed to use our brains to accomplish projects, complete tasks, multitask and innovate. But, the truth is, brains perform better when allowed to rest from time to time. If you are working yourself or your employees non-stop in order to innovate, you are probably making a mistake. Read more at

http://donjosephgoewey.com/less-is-more-when-it-comes-to-the-brain/

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 (jeffreyb@jpb.com) and is published on a monthly basis.

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