Report 103

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

Wednesday 5 December 2012
Issue 218

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.

Note

Most articles in this issue of Report 103 can also be found in the archives together with dozens more articles, papers and thoughts.

In this issue of Report 103

The Seven Essential Characteristics of Innovative Companies
Innovate Better with Anticonventional Thinking (A Self Promotional Message)
No UK companies in Top 100 Global Innovators List?
Time to Take a Long Look at Your Innovation Eco-Systems
Characteristics of Highly Creative People

Also some self promotional stuff about anticonventional thinking....

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The Seven Essential Characteristics of Innovative Companies

Jeffrey Baumgartner

What makes for an innovative company? An innovation initiative is not enough. Having the word "innovation" in your company slogan or all over your web site is not enough. Indeed, I would argue that any kind of focus on innovation as an end is detrimental to innovation. Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. Here are seven essential characteristics of innovative companies. How well does your organisation do?

1. Unique and Relevant Strategy

Arguably, the most defining characteristic of a truly innovative company is having a unique and relevant strategy. We all know what companies like Apple, Facebook and Google do. That's because they make their strategies clear and relentless follow them. An innovative smaller player may not be recognised globally, but its leaders, employees, business partners and customers all will have a clear idea of the company's strategy. If a business does not have definable, unique strategy, it will not be innovative. Bland strategies, such as "to be the best", do not provide a path to innovation in the same way clearer strategies, such as "to be on the cutting edge of mobile communications technology", "to build the world's safest cars"or "to deliver anything anywhere" do. If your strategy is vague or fails to differentiate your company from the competition, you should change this situation as quickly as possible!

2. Innovation Is a Means to Achieve Strategic Goals

Highly innovative companies do not see innovation as an end, but rather as a means to achieving strategic goals. Just as a good camera is an essential tool that enables the photographer to take professional images and the saw is an essential tool for the carpenter, innovation is an essential tool for visionary companies intent on achieving their strategic goals. Indeed, if you look at the web sites of the world's most innovative companies, they tend not to trumpet innovation, but rather corporate vision.

3. Innovators Are Leaders

The one thing innovation provides more than anything else is market leadership. When companies use innovation to achieve strategic goals, they inevitably take the lead in their markets. Unfortunately, this does not always translate to being the most successful or profitable. Amazon has been an innovator from the beginning, setting many of the standards for e-commerce. Nevertheless, it took some years for the company to become profitable. Cord was one of the world's most innovative car companies, launching cutting edge innovations such as front wheel drive and pop-up headlights -- in the 1920s and 30s. However the company was never very successful financially and went out of business in 1938. On the other hand, innovators like Apple and Google have been financially successful as a result of their innovation. In short, innovators are leaders, but not always profitable leaders!

4. Innovators Implement

Most businesses have a lot of creative employees with a lot of ideas. Some of those ideas are even relevant to companies' needs. However, one thing that differentiates innovators from wannabe innovators is that innovators implement ideas. Less innovative companies talk more about ideas than implementing them!

5. Failure Is an Option

I would argue the the most critical element of business culture, for an innovative company, is giving employees freedom and encouragement to fail. If employees know that they can fail without endangering their careers, they are more willing to take on risky, innovative projects that offer huge potential rewards to their companies. On the other hand, if employees believe that being part of a failed project will have professional consequences, they will avoid risk -- and hence innovation -- like the plague. More importantly, if senior managers reward early failure, employees are far more likely to evaluate projects regularly and kill those projects that are failing -- before that failure becomes too expensive. This frees up resources and budget for new innovative endeavours. However, in businesses where failure is not an option, employees will often stick with failing projects, investing ever more resources in hopes that the project will eventually succeed. When it does not, losses are greater and reputations are ruined. As a result, companies that reward failure often fail less than those that discourage it.

6. Environment of Trust

The Innovative company provides its employees with an environment of trust. There is a lot of risk involved in innovation. Highly creative ideas often initially sound stupid. If employees fear ridicule for sharing outrageous ideas, they will not share such ideas. Likewise, if employees fear reprimand for participating in unsuccessful projects, they will not participate (see item 5 above). If employees do not trust each other, they will be watching their backs all the time. If they fear managers will steal their ideas and claim them as their own, employees will not share ideas. On the other hand, if employees know they can take reasonable risks without fear, if they know outrageous ideas are welcome, if they know that their managers will champion their ideas and credit them for those ideas, these employees can be creative, implement ideas and drive the company's innovation. In short, creativity and innovation thrive when people in an organisation trust each other and their organisation.

7. Autonomy

Along with trust, individual and team autonomy is a key component of innovation. If you give individuals and teams clear goals together with the freedom to find their own paths for achieving those goals, you create fertile ground for innovation. But, if managers watch over their subordinates' shoulders, micro-managing their every move, you stifle the creativity and individual thought that is necessary for innovation. Of course giving employees autonomy means they may make mistakes. They may choose inefficient routes to achieving goals. But at worst, they will learn from their mistakes and inefficiencies. At best, they will discover new and better ways of accomplishing objectives. Most importantly, if you hire intelligent, capable, creative people and give them the freedom to solve problems, they will do so. And, in so doing, they well help innovation to thrive throughout the company.

What Do You Think?

There you have it, the seven essential characteristics of a creative company. What do you think? How well does your company fit? Have I missed an essential characteristic? I'd love to know your thoughts. Share them with me at jeffreyb@jpb.com!

Innovate Better with Anticonventional Thinking

A Self-Promotional Message

Have you tried brainstorming, only to be underwhelmed by the results? Are your innovation initiatives generating a lot of ideas, but little innovation? Do you feel there is a better way to tap into employee creativity in order to feed your innovation process? If so, you, your colleagues and your company will benefit from an anticonventional thinking workshop!

Anticonventional thinking is a powerful alternative to brainstorming that is based on solid scientific research into the creative process and modelled after the way highly creative people like artists and writers collaborate on projects. Better still, it is easy to learn and fun!

Over the past year, I have held anticonventional thinking workshops with businesses, European projects and even the office of the prime minister in cities in Belgium, the UK, Portugal, the USA, Dubai and China.

These innovative businesses and government bodies know they need a better way to innovate if they wish to keep ahead of the competition. And they recognise that anticonventional thinking is a better way. Learn more on my web site, contact me here or simply reply to this newsletter and I will get back to you as quickly as I can!

No UK companies in Top 100 Global Innovators List?

Time to Take a Long Look at Your Innovation Eco-Systems

By Simon Evans

It’s official. In 2012, by at least one measure, there is not one single UK based company in the list of top 100 global innovators! The Thomson Reuters list of 100 top global innovators makes for uncomfortable reading if you are in British business. While it is true to say that some of the measures used do not favour some of our highly innovative sectors like pharmaceuticals (which has a lower throughput of patents than many of those on the top 100 list), there is clearly a serious problem to address. Can this really be true? If so, we British need to wake up and smell the innovative coffee beans!

For the last couple of years, my company has been asking businesses, large and small, about how they view their innovation processes. The outcome of these conversations has been very interesting. Many, maybe most, companies feel constrained in their approach to innovation - they are lacking the freedom to innovate. When we look to why this is the case, a number of common factors usually emerge:

Financial pressures - "We cannot afford to innovate until the recession is over"
Risk aversion - “It’s too risky to put ourselves above the parapet at the moment”
Lack of acknowledgment that times have changed and the approach to innovation needs to change too "we always do it this way, it's always worked before".
Lack of focus – “We are too busy to think about that right now…”
Death by initiative – “Oh yes we have an innovation initiative, I think. But they never come up with anything”

So, innovation is hard at the moment. How do we break through these barriers and give innovation leaders like you the freedom to innovate at increasing innovation velocities?

One thing you can do is to step back and view your innovation process as an eco-system. This innovation eco-system provides a highly visual, holistic view which allows you to appreciate the breadth of options available, and to ensure that all parts of the process are nourished and working efficiently. It forces you to think about the whole end to end process, not just that bit where you come up with new ideas -- what is the use of a brilliant idea if it generates no value?

We can divide the eco-system into 4 zones of activity (or habitats), each one of which is dependent on the other just like in a natural eco-system.

Creativity – the habitat where ideas are created, incubated and explored
Development – where the raw ideas become a tangible reality with potential value
Value Realisation – the habitat where all that potential is converted to real returns – generating value
Leadership – the habitat that links the other three and contains all those activities that create and maintain a healthy eco-system – the gardeners if you like

Once you have a mental picture of the overall eco-system, you can imagine a set of processes, architectures, skills, people, strategies etc. populating the four habitats. If all four habitats are properly supported, resourced and contain all the activities that are needed, we can see them all coming together to create an efficient way of creating and developing ideas and then driving the realisation of their value. By examining each zone in turn, and asking yourself searching and honest questions about what is really needed to make that zone work, you stand a better chance of identifying where the real opportunities and barriers are. It’s not just a question of identifying two or three methods (e.g. brainstorming), you may be looking at 10 or 20 linked activities, some of which may be uncomfortable, for example, is your management truly open to new ideas or does the “innovation initiative” you are part of in reality stand no chance of delivering? Are there some cultural components to the challenge?

What can you do?
Identify your team. Look for the mavericks, the rule breakers, the free radicals. Who are the people that find ways round problems? Bring along at least one person with a totally different background to you. Avoid the people that suck energy out of the room. Look to cross-pollinate both within and without your organisation.
Take a day or better two with your team in an inspiring environment away from your normal environment (outside is good – how about a BBQ in the woods?).
Pre-read some inspiring literature – try “The Ten Faces of Innovation “ by Tom Kelley.
Switch laptops and phones off.
Take plenty of post its, large sheets of paper and lots of imagination.
Set yourselves an inspiring strategic challenge to provide some basic direction.
Open your mind to the possibilities. Challenge the status quo and your assumptions.
Brush away the constraints that you have felt to date.
How do your 4 different habitats link together and communicate?
Consider the 4 zones in your eco-system in turn and start analysing and asking yourselves hard questions about each. What processes do you need? What resources? Where are the barriers and how can you overcome them? E.g. (and there are hundreds or thousands of these!)

Creative Zone: How are we going to come up with new ideas? What knowledge do we have that we don’t use? Can you find an intrapreneur? Can you bring the customer in? Do you have the necessary courage to suggest this? How do you record ideas? What incentives can you offer for new ideas? Hold a mass innovation event. Consider your environment. Give staff time to work on their own projects.
Development Zone: Do we have the capacity to do something with ideas if we have them? Build a user experience blueprint. Do you have diversity in your team? What are your competitors doing? Run a development pipeline. Open source development. Mass collaboration. Marketing plan. Design agency. In or out licence. Prototyping. Shark cage.
Value Realisation. How do we get people to know about our product? How do we advertise? Bugs. Kaizen. Great customer service. Mashup. Know your customer. Social media. Tagging. Building trust in brand. Invite the hackers.
Leadership. Do you have an innovation strategy? Is our innovation aimed in the right direction? How does it fit within the organisation? Patents. Management open to new ideas. Metrics. Problem solvers. Employ an anthropologist. Who are your story tellers? Who can architect your user experience? Where is the money coming from? Meeting of minds. Do you recognise the players?

Tell stories about successes and failures. Inspire each other.
Develop a plan which starts the task of populating your eco-system, remembering that you will be judged by the value that you create, not just the number of ideas that you have!
Take the plan back to base and start implementing it!
Keep it fresh – keep challenging and thinking.

Taking this approach can give organisations like yours real momentum to drive “innovative innovation” and to create real freedom for the innovation leaders to finally make a difference. Do you have the title of Chief Innovation Officer? Do you know what this really means? In reality, it is your job to set up and nurture the delicate webs of interconnecting activity across your innovation eco-system. Draw a picture of it, and hang it on your wall to remind yourself every day what you should be doing! Break out the watering can and fertiliser!

About Simon Evans

Simon Evans along with Victor Newman created InnovoFlow ltd in 2009 to help organisations look at their innovation capability in a different way. They run workshops using the InnovoZone™ game to explore innovation eco-systems and inspire agile innovation leaders. For more information about innovation eco-systems, InnovoFlow and Simon, visit their web site: www.innovoflow.co.uk.

Characteristics of Highly Creative People

Jeffrey Baumgartner

There are a surprising number of blog posts about the characteristics of creative people. However, most of these seem to focus either on an idealised vision of an artist or the blog-writers idealised self image! Here is my take on the characteristics of highly creative people. However, what I have done is look at how creative people think -- based on my understanding of the latest research -- and applied it behaviour.

It is also worth bearing in mind that creativity is not all about positives. There are good and bad creative people. Moreover, there seem to be some characteristics of creative people, such as dishonesty, that are not very nice. More controversially, some research has shown a correlation between creativity and mental illness. Though, as I noted in a recent issue of Report 103, there is apparently some doubt about how true that is.

The characteristics of highly creative people are, I believe, the result of two specific behaviours of such people. Let's look at those behaviours and how they affect broader behaviour.

Behaviour One: Make More Use of Their Mental Raw Material

It seems that when highly creative people are trying to solve a problem or achieve a goal, particularly when the goal is related to their area of creative strength, they use much more of their brains than do ordinary people or, indeed, even themselves when not focused on a creative task. If the average person is asked to draw a picture of a cat, she will most likely think about the physical appearance of a cat and replicate it as best she can with pen and paper. The creative artist, on the other hand, will think in much more depth. She'll think not only about the cat, but the placement of the cat; what the cat is doing; the lighting; the kind of lines to use and much more. She may decide to humanise the cat and give it emotions. Perhaps she'll decide to draw a sexy cat with a human body wearing an evening gown. Maybe she'll simply draw a blur representing a cat in motion.

By using much more of her brain to achieve her goal, the highly creative person in effect provides herself with more raw material from which to construct ideas than the average person. The average person thinks only about drawings of cats and the basic characteristics of cats. This limits the level of creativity she can achieve. The highly creative person thinks about much more -- all the while retaining some connection to cats. It is not surprising that, with so much raw material, she is able to be more creative in the realisation of her ideas.

They Think Before They Act

It takes time to run through all that raw material in the brain. This is why creative people tend to think before they act. The play with the issue in their minds for a time, looking at a range of possibilities before choosing a direction. I see this when I work with creative people. When you give an average person a creative challenge, she tends immediately to try and come up with ideas. But because her mind is too focused on the issues of the challenge, her ideas are limited in scope as well. They are conventional, obvious ideas. The highly creative person, on the other hand, tends to turn the problem around in her head. She asks questions, thinks about it in various scenarios and brings seemingly unrelated information into her problem solving.

For example, if you ask an averagely creative person to come up with ideas for things you could do with a big box (for example, the kind of box a new washing machine might be packaged in), she will immediately think of boxes and their usual uses: storage, children's toys, perhaps protection against the elements.

A highly creative person, would go further. She might think about using a box as a children's toy (as would most people), but she would also think about the kind of games children might play in a box. She might imagine climbing into the box and then wonder what it would be like. She might think about tearing apart the box and what to do with the pieces - perhaps using them for kindling for a fire or raw material for a sculpture. She might invert the box in her mind and climb on top of it. What would happen if she did that, she might wonder. All of these thoughts enable her to come up with many more ideas than the averagely creative person. But these thoughts all come from her mind. She is simply using more of her mind and its memories, thoughts and notions in order to construct ideas.

Incidentally, the highly creative person does not focus on her left brain or right brain for a simple reason: it's a myth¹. Creative people use a lot of their brains, not one hemisphere or the other!

Curiosity Is Creative Play

Highly creative people are often cited as being very curious. This fits with the way their brains work. Rather than simply collect information, their brains play with it. One person might see a horse standing in a field and think it is a magnificent looking animal. Another, more curiously creative person, might wonder what the horse thinks about all day in the field. She might wonder how the horse can cope for long hours of inactivity without a book to read. Or she might notice that the horse tends to hang out by the fence that borders another field where another horse is resident. The creative person might wonder how two animals that do not have spoken or written language might bond and what kinds of friendships horses might have.

Spontaneous Ideas

It is by often asking these questions, wondering and being curious that creative people come up with spontaneous ideas. For instance, it is by asking what use could be made of not very sticky glue that some people discovered Post-Its. Pablo Picasso wondered how he could depict three dimensional reality, as viewed from different perspectives, and came up with surrealism.

Behaviour Two: Less Intellectual Regulation

The dorsolateral prefrontal region of the brain is responsible for, among other things, intellectual regulation². It includes the brain's censorship bureau; the bit of the brain that prevents us from saying or doing inappropriate things. It allows us to control impulses and to choose appropriate courses of behaviour according to circumstances. It seems that in highly creative people, this part of the brain becomes much less active than normal during the period of creation. This makes sense. If you can reduce the level of thought regulation when generating creative work (whether ideas, music, artwork), then fewer ideas will be filtered out as inappropriate and more will be developed and shared.

In averagely creative people, on the other hand, the dorsolateral prefrontal region remains more active all the time. It filters out crazy thoughts, it prevents the person from saying, doing or even thinking too much about outrageous ideas. It ensures that averagely creative people think and behave conventionally. And for many people, this is preferred. Most people desire to fit into society and succeed according to existing rules. It is only creative misfits who want to succeed by doing things their own way, by ignoring convention, by having the audacity to believe they know better than convention.

For many people, this is a good thing. Sharing stupid ideas is embarrassing. People might laugh at the individual who shares seemingly stupid ideas. People might question her competence. Moreover, the averagely creative individual may wonder why she should bother with creative ideas when more conventional solutions work well enough. No one is going to be laughed at or reprimanded for coming up with a conventional idea that is in keeping with the norms of the local culture (whether it is society, a school or a workplace). However, sharing a radical idea that might be stupid could well result in ridicule. Acting on an idea which could fail miserably could get you in trouble.

In short, it is safer to be conventional and incremental in your creativity than it is to be unconventional and radical in your creativity -- at least for most people. Highly creative people are different. Their brains are programmed to worry less about fitting in with conventions and staying within norms. It is not that highly creative people are not afraid of ridicule or criticism (indeed, many artists are highly sensitive). Rather, it never occurs to them that others might ridicule their ideas.

Creative People Are Not as Rebellious as You Think

This leads to the myth that creative people are rebellious. I do not believe this is entirely true. But where most people, thanks to their active dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes, regulate their thinking and behaviour to fit with conventional behaviour, creative people are not so handicapped. Instead, they follow their own rules or systems for evaluating ideas and deciding whether to move forward with those ideas. These rule systems are often logical, at least to the creative thinker. But, because they are not about conforming to social norms, it makes the creative thinker seem rebellious. An artist, for example, will not make a name for herself by studiously copying current trends. Rather, she will become famous by being unique. So, if she makes decisions based on what is commonplace, ordinary and conforming in the art world, she will never make a name for herself. However, if she purposely veers from what is popular in order to carve out her own, unique style -- she may become famous. She may make a name for herself.

Creative People Are Logical

Another common fallacy about creative people is that they are not logical; that they are driven purely by feeling and emotion. I do not believe this is true. Rather, as noted, creative people are not handicapped by a need to conform to social norms. They are not compelled to be a part of popular culture. Rather, they are driven by a logic that suits their needs and is logical to them. That logic may be based in part on emotions and feelings -- especially in some artists. But it is a logic nevertheless. All people need to make decisions and decisions are based on some kind of logic. The creative artist is no exception. If anything, by not feeling compelled to fit the demands of popular culture, the creative artist needs to be even more logical than the average person who assumes that if everyone wears and buys a particular style jacket, then it is safe to buy and wear such a jacket.

Creative People Tend to Be Less Honest

Another apparent consequence of having a relaxed dorsolateral prefrontal region, combined with a brain that is adept at building ideas, appears to be a reduced need to be honest. Research by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely³ confirms that, in general, highly creative people are less honest than averagely creative people. The reason for this seems to be that creative people can use their creativity to justify their actions in ways that less creative people cannot do. A lot of people, especially highly creative people as well as those who believe themselves to be very creative, will balk at this and claim that they are very honest. And it is true that they believe that. That is because their creativity is successful in convincing them that their behaviour is justified.

Creative People Are Introverts, Extroverts, Collaborators, Independent, Big, Small, Fat, Skinny...

I have seen some bloggers claim that creative people are introverts; others that creative people are extroverts. I have heard that creative work better in groups and that they work better individually. However, I have never seen these assumptions supported in any way. The truth is, creativity seems to have little to do with how well one functions socially, one's weight (though I would assume that being in good health would help the brain function better) or other personal characteristics. The truth is, creative people come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, colours and personalities. What truly distinguishes them from others is that they use more of their brains to generate ideas -- which provides them with more raw material for building unique ideas -- and less of their brains to regulate the development and sharing of those unusual ideas.