Tag Archives: thinking

Innovation Is Creative Thinking With Purpose

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Innovation is creativity with a purpose. It is the creation and use of knowledge with intent. It is not only creating new ideas but creating with a specific intention and with plans to take those ideas and make something that will find purpose the world. Innovation is ideas in action, not the ideas themselves. Innovation is also a word that gets thrown about, often without really considering the reality that it is, in fact, damn hard work. What makes it hard work isn’t the generation of new ideas, but the fact that turning complexities into simple, clear realities can be excruciatingly difficult, but that is precisely what needs to be done to make innovation useful. Simplicity and clarity are tough to do.

Innovation, whether we’re talking about product design or a marketing plan, should be simple, understandable, and open for a wide range of people. Innovation is becoming more of an open process, or it should be. The days of the closed-door R&D session is gone as we incorporate more engagement of users, customers, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees in the process. Most companies are very good at launching, promoting and selling their products and services, but they often struggle with the front end of the innovation process, those stages dealing with turning research and brainstorming insights into new ideas.  The creating, analyzing, and developing side of things is often murky or done in a haphazard way. Articulating a simple system with clearly defined activities is central to bringing innovation to life and involving a wide variety of stakeholders and collaborators who can understand and engage in making the beginning stage of the innovation process less confused. It is as much art as it is science.

Easier said than done – you need a starting point. The simplest and most obvious element in this is to begin with a system of innovation best practices. You would typically generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept. This is the no-holds-barred side of the idea generation process and allows for people to begin exploring multiple trajectories. The key is to make sure the ideas don’t remain in a vacuum, but are open to everyone. With that in mind, it is extremely important to ensure that ideas are captured and stored in one place, whether electronically or on a wall (literally) dedicated to the task. Truly breakthrough innovations are not solitary work, they are part of a shared experience where ideas build on each other. They are the result of collaboration. This means that the work involves others to help you generate ideas, develop concepts, and communicate the concepts in meaningful and memorable ways. The more open the process, the more likely it is to get buy-in as people engage directly in the innovation process.

Next, make sure people have access to all the information available to them. Research around a problem or a people is often lost once the report is handed over and the presentation of findings complete. Central to the success of an innovation project is to make sure themes and experiences are captured and easily available to the people tasked with generating ideas. So make it visible, make it simple and make sure people are returning to the research (and researchers) again and again. This is about more than posting personas on boards around a room. It involves thinking about and articulating cultural practices in such a way that they are visible, clear and upfront. As people think and create they should constantly be reminded of the people and contexts for which they are creating.

Once the stage is set, the problem and hopeful outcomes need to be made clear. This is fairly obvious, but it’s easy to drift away from the goals as ideas emerge and people have time to simply forget why we’re innovating (or attempting to innovate ate any rate). So make them real, crystallize the problems and challenges. Make them visible at every step of the process.  In addition to posting the goals, be sure to have space to pose questions that are grounded in the problems or opportunities for innovation. Categorize the types of questions and ask that people visit them every step of the way to ensure the process stays on track and is grounded in the goals of the project. Categories of question types to consider might include:

  • How Will This Impact the Community: How can we help people, build communities and reflect the cultures and practices for which we are designing?
  • What is the Opportunity: How can we create something that provides a better life for the intended users?
  • Is It New or are We Simply Tweaking Something: How can the thing we’re creating change the current situation or are we simply creating a variation on an established theme?
  • How Will It Be Interpreted: What challenges do we face in getting people to accept the concepts and what cultural or psychological barriers do we need to overcome?

These are just a few examples, but they represent some of the ideas that might emerge when thinking of new designs, models and messaging strategies. They will, of course, vary depending on the goals of the organization. If your goal is to build a new delivery system for medications or if it is to do something as broad as change the way people eat, then the questions will change. The point is to have a space that opens up the dialog, not just a space to throw out ideas.

The point to all this is that in order to innovate, you need to clarify a simple system that all the various contributors can use. Establish a system and stick to it. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in, get all the parties who will contribute involved and make sure they engage in an open environment. Create questions to ask and areas of exploration. Do that and you will move from a complex mess to something that can be acted upon.

The Death of Innovation and the Renaissance Mind

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There seems to be a degree of consensus that once a company hits a certain size, when it becomes a “big” business, it stops innovating or thinking in new ways.  Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, such as Apple or Patagonia, but they are just that, exceptions.  Assuming for a moment that there is some truth in the collective interpretation of how businesses change through time, we have to ask why it should be so.  I think it is simply that we forget what it is we actually do – “I make killer Product X” becomes “I do job X.”  Customers become data points and thinking is constrained.  Innovation becomes stale at best, dies outright at worst. There is a lack of empathy and gut-level understanding of  their customers and how their products fit into the big picture. Lacking a gut sense for what keeps ordinary people up at night, individuals within an organization begin to live in a bubble, unable to broaden their view and be genuinely creative. We’ve all heard this argument before and there is a great deal of truth in it, but that’s just part of the problem.

Our companies have spent ages trying to understand the customer, but it has been in the last 100 years that the process has become extremely complex.  Particularly since the introduction of the computer.  We have spent our time creating systems to handle incredibly complicated problems. Today, if you can ask a good question, our organizations have the power to provide you with a very detailed answer to what ails you. The problem is that don’t always ask good questions.  And when we do, the answers are not answers at all – they are the recitation of numbers that address anything but the question asked.

To my mind, “What is the question?” that seems to be the core of the problem. In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, the ambiguity that surrounds us is rising to unprecedented levels. And that’s a serious problem that our current statistical models and systems can’t handle. We can no longer assume we know what people are doing or why they are doing it based on the results of a survey, sales data, or traffic patterns, both online and off.  Far too often, we simply ask questions that aren’t relevant or lack practical validity.  Why should this be the case?

I think it lies in the ambiguity and contextuality I mentioned before.  Large companies are phenomenally good at managing complexity, but they’re quite bad at tackling ambiguity.  As long as the complexity is constrained by highly logical process, everything is fine, but human beings are far from logical.  Or, more accurately, they are logical according to their worldviews; worldviews that increasingly deviate from the uniformity that emerged during the modernist period of the last century.  A complicated problem is like playing a game of chess, an ambiguous problem is finding yourself in a new country, trying to find a restaurant and hoping it’s a place you will fall in love.  In this situation, the variables can’t be readily accounted for until you’ve done some legwork and learned a thing or two about the people, the place and yourself.  In more concrete terms, take something as seemingly simple as shopping for groceries. Are the decisions we make when filling the pantry transportation driven, health driven, calorie driven? Is grocery shopping a political statement, an expression of emotional bonds within a family, a way of coping with emotional stress? The answer is “yes” to all of the above.

That means that you aren’t guaranteed to increase sales just because you know people tend to turn right when you enter a store, that they are more inclined to explore an end cap when it incorporates the color red, or even that mom’s are increasing using smart phones while shopping.  All you’ve done in that situation is identify data points. It doesn’t mean you have identified why people do what they do.

How do you get at that sort of thing?  The simple answer is fieldwork, but that answer is too limited.  So is talking about multidisciplinary teams.  It is about having multidisciplinary thinking – the renaissance experience reborn. These are people who are part scientist, part humanist, part artist and part business person.  Simply having a range of talents and disciplines working together on a problem isn’t sufficient because it becomes a process of arguing points from a single trajectory or handing of elements a project from one person to another.  When multidisciplinary thinking comes together, by contrast, the disciplines themselves start to mutate, allowing for breakthrough thinking.  We start to see art and science blend into something unique. We start practicing business like a designer.  We shape technology the way we shape a painting, a myth or a story.  Rather than seeing data points, we see the linkages between them and start to produce solutions that address real problems.

From the standpoint of designing a research and/or strategy project, it means beginning by getting the client and the team comfortable with letting go of the need to focus on instant solutions. It also means having the client and the team, regardless of training, practice thinking differently.  Accountants and engineers need to enter the field and learn through practice to think in terms of complex adaptive systems, rather than complex systems (note the lack of the word “adaptive”).  It also means fieldwork researchers spending time think through every insight from the vantage point of “how do we make money on this.” The point is that as different types of thinkers learn to think in more expansive ways, the more likely they are to develop breakthrough ideas.

What’s the payoff?  The introduction of the personal computer.  The introduction of the automobile.  The introduction of inoculation to medicine. We need to think this way more than ever, particularly in an economy defined by prolonged ambiguity and a world where identity drives the purchase decisions as much as necessity.