Tools & Techniques for Ideation

Introduction to Ideation
Before briefly describing creative thinking tools or techniques, there are three points which need attention.

One: the old adage that two know more than one is most certainly true for creative thinking.
It is no coincidence that the advertising industry introduced the concept of so-called Creative Teams (Art Director and Copywriter) in the early 1960’s, that tools for collaborative systematic inventive thinking or group work are – after ideation – by far the largest group of related tools, nor that the most universally used and well-know model for collective ideation – Brainstorming – was created by an advertising man, BBDO co-founder Alex Osborn.

Two: Listing is extremely useful in virtually any structured, systematic thinking and/or Ideation effort. Listing synonyms, antonyms, advantages, disadvantages, alternatives, assumptions, bugs, categories, limitations, opposites, parts, relations, rules, suppositions and so forth, is practically always a good starting point for personal and collective thinking processes.
Listing is an integral part of many of the systematic creative processes or methods described here, because – as established earlier – quantity is, especially at the initial stages of the creative process, more important than quality.
Fluency – the ability to generate large amounts of ideas or alternative solutions for a problem – is also an integral part of virtually all creativity tests, for starters the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT).
In my experience Listing is the simplest, most practical and most productive precursor for creative thinking, even with totally untrained subjects or individuals with exceptionally well developed creativity inhibitors. After all: almost anybody can make a shopping list.

Methods and Tools for the Creative Production Process

The following is a series of methodologies to structure the problem solving or creative process.
I describe them here briefly with the purpose of indexing the methods I have found.
If you want to know more about a particular one, I'd suggest you Google the term, since the majority of them were found on the Web during my research.

15 Sparks
A method originally used for internal staff training by the advertising agency McCann Erickson, but by now extensively tried by myself and others in academic practice throughout Latin America.
Although oriented at, and illustrated with, examples from advertising and marketing, it has also proven useful in classes and seminars on branding, innovation, strategic thinking, and so forth.
As the name suggests, it consists of 15 statements directed at changing the mind-set: Instead of asking who we are talking to, ask who we are NOT talking to, Turn your biggest threats into opportunities, Co-create with your consumers, How can your brand, product or service become a tangible part of culture? and If you product were a service, what would it be?, among others.

This week's interesting articles

Here are this week's articles I consider worth reading.
I regularly post links to articles like these on my Twitter stream so, if you like my likes and want to stay updated, you might want to follow me: @gerardprins

Business Insider: 14 Lessons From Benjamin Franklin About Getting What You Want In Life
Forbes: Why Creativity is more Profitable than Competitiveness
Forbes: Creating Innovators: Why America's Education System is Obsolete (Ed.: And not just America's)
Harvard Business Review: In Praise of Irrational Innovators
Harvard Business Review: Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains
New York Times: The Creative Monopoly

Recent interesting articles on Creativity, Strategy and Innovation

Here are some articles from the last few weeks that I consider worth reading.
I regularly post links to articles like these on my Twitter stream so, if you like my likes and want to stay updated, you might want to follow me: @gerardprins


Forbes: The Only Two Types of Enterprise That Really Matter
Forbes: Sony: How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed a Once Great Company
FastCompany: Has Innovation Lost Its Meaning?
FastCoDesign: What MBAs and MFAs get wrong about solving business problems
Harvard Business Review: Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation
Harvard Business Review: The Power of Small Wins
The Atlantic: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber

Problem Definition. The Most Critical Step.

It is no casualty that “Problem Definition” – in some wording or other – is an integral part of all the step-models described in a previous post.
However, considering Kevin Kelly’s tenth paradigm: “Opportunities before Efficiencies” subtitled: “Don’t solve problems; seek opportunities”, problem-definition seems to be too limiting a term in many of today’s competitive environments of accelerating change.

Moreover, an organization may not have or perceive to have any particular “problems”. This does not mean to say that it can sit on its laurels, though, even if only because competition, changing customer preferences, technological breakthroughs or even an ad-hoc crisis may present any given organization with a “Houston, we have a problem” moment at any given point in time, more often than not when least expected.

Therefore, I feel it is more adequate to speak of “Problem Definition & Opportunity Finding”, especially because these two are not in any way mutually exclusive.
In fact, the realization that an opportunity has presented itself to the organization, then turns into a “Problem” in the classical strategic-creative context, because it constitutes the problem definition that focuses the creative effort: How to take advantage of it?

Solid problem definition is of absolute essence, whether when solving problems or finding opportunities, because a badly focused, fuzzy problem- or opportunity definition leads inevitably to bad “output”: poor, or – worse – useless ideas and a waste of precious time, thus, resources.
This may not be a disaster in the case of a failing advertising campaign, however, in the case of corporate strategic planning, it may well mean the difference between life or death for an organization.

What is creativity?

The term creative is “fuzzy” – in others words – means many different things to many different people.
This makes it necessary to clarify both the meaning and context of the word within the framework of this blog.
There are numerous definitions of the term, but English creative education expert and Ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation – Sir Ken Robinson – defines it so: “The process of having original ideas that have value”.

This is a practical definition for two reasons:
1 – It establishes that Creativity is the result of a process.
2 – It establishes that the Creative process is directed at generating valuable, original ideas.

Derivative of this definition is that the quality, originality and value of an idea are “umfeld” – environment – determined: where it may have value in one context, it may be worthless in others.
Moreover, where it may be unoriginal in one context, it may be original – thus – valuable in others; this explains why the “copy/paste method”, that is: copying an idea from one context to another, is a basic, yet useful creative tool.

Am I creative?

Popular believe has it that creativity is reserved to the so-called “Creative Elites”, located at the top of the white-collar chain in so-called “Creative Industries”, e.g. arts, advertising, design, motion picture, engineering, R&D, and so on.
This conviction is probably the most undesirable of all collateral damages caused by industrial-revolution education, and nothing could be less true.

Human beings are born creative, human evolution is the result of that creativity and people apply it in every aspect of their everyday lives.
People consciously or unconsciously use creativity to solve every day problems, but probably the most obvious example of human creativity is lying: the ability to present others with more or less elaborate constructs of alternative truths.

Unlike the many creative skills extinguished by industrial-revolution schooling, lying is the one universal creative social skill that upbringing and education are apparently incapable of eradicating, even though it is most likely the first “do-not-rule” parents and educators bring to bear on a young child: “Thou shalt not lie”.
The richness of the concept and its deep embedding in universal culture is best illustrated through language.
An article on Wikipedia identifies no less than 21 different types of lies, while cognitive science has busied itself with the phenomenon ever since Augustine of Hippo’s “Taxonomy of Lies” (± AD 395).

What is Creativization?

With innovation becoming more and more a decisive factor for corporate survival, and – according to the 2010 IBM Global Survey – a concern for 80% of CEO’s worldwide, it is surprising to observe how few organizations have innovation high on their strategic agendas, or even on their strategic agenda at all.

I believe that innovation starts with creative ideas, while innovation – as seen from a strategic point of view – involves the successful implementation of these ideas within the organization.
Even though in most organizations individuals or small groups may be responsible for the actual generation of new ideas, their implementation is a task that must be shared by the entire organization, and most particularly by its leadership.

The latter is, however, impossible to achieve without the strategic conviction that permanent innovation and reinvention are the only way for an organization to survive and thrive in an environment of permanently accelerating change.

A first problem – according to my research – is that many corporate leaders consider themselves “creative” or “very creative”, while – in fact – they are not; at least not according to classical creative assessment standards.
It seems fair to conclude that leaders who believe themselves to be (very) creative, but are not in fact, are likely to have similar misconceptions about the creative environment in their organizations, the incentives placed on ideation and the openness, receptivity towards the ideas of its members.