About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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Monthly Archives
June 27, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Connecting and blogging while here has been even more challenging than I suspected! But I'm going home today and I'll definitely be updating over the weekend to catch up....I've had a lot of interesting experiences and conversations, including a really fascinating one with some guys who presented on SIT, a very different creative problem-solving process than CPS that looks like it'll be a real paradigm shift if it catches on....I guess you could really call it "innovative creativity"!!
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| Category: CPSI
June 25, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I went to an impromptu night-time session called a "Nite Flite" on Monday night and had a terrific experience. Maybe I found this so terrific because I had a couple of beers before I went, but I've had a lot of non-drinking hours since then to think about it, and I still think it's great.
The presenter (again, it was Jon Pearson, the Robin Williams of creativity consulting) had us spend 15 seconds writing on a piece of paper a thought we had never had before. Later, at almost the end of the session, he asked us to turn the paper over and, again in about 15 seconds, write down a thought about the meaning of life.
Then at his instruction we crumpled up our papers, tossed them up in the air like Mary Tyler Moore's beret, and left the room! That was the end!
Later I talked to a fellow participant who said this exercise can be useful in ideation sessions and brainstorming meetings if everybody also is asked to pick up one of the random pieces of crumpled paper and use whatever is written there as a starting point from which to create.
Now I realize I found this so powerful because it reminded me of blogging. Isn't this what we're doing?! Writing bits of thoughts, both profound and not so profound, and sending them out for strangers to pick up at random and use as a starting point for their own thoughts....which they then send out too, and even better, an interesting conversation can be started between random blogging strangers (or would that be random strange bloggers!)....blogging of course is a much better distribution method than crumpling up your written thoughts and tossing them into the wind, or even making a paper airplane out of them and flying them off to Buffalo or wherever....!
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| Category: CPSI
June 24, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I'm in Buffalo, New York, which is oddly enough a hotbed of creativity (no, really!). Every summer the Creative Education Foundation holds its Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) here, and I am here to continue the process of becoming certified as a CPS facilitator. I also have my daughters with me (15 and 17 years old), who are attending a "youth" version of CPSI. And yes, we are all three staying in the same hotel room, a situation that in itself demands some amount of creative problem solving, especially innovative shower scheduling. But it's fun (no, really!).....for some reason having to do with the movie The Ice Storm they are this week referring to each other as Charles.
Posting will be chancy because I'm using a cranky laptop from my company's "pool" of road-use laptops and I'm on dial-up. But I'll keep at it as best I can.
I'm keeping my eye out for continuations of the creativity vs innovation conversation we've been having here. Innovation per se is rarely mentioned here -- CPSI is all about creativity, from becoming more creative yourself and making your company more creative, to practicing creativity as something of a religion. But to me, innovation (the subject) is lurking around every corner and subtexting every sentence.
Yesterday I went to a jaw-dropping session led by Jon Pearson (imagine Robin Williams as a teacher), and coming away from that I had the thought: Creativity has to do with seeing things differently. Innovation can be (though isn't always) the result, the changed behavior that occurs as a result of seeing things differently.
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June 18, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Dina Mehta blogged this about my post about the difference between creativity and innovation:
"The word innovation implies creativity - without creativity there cannot be innovation. But the reverse may not be true.
I like this distinction -- "Is innovation the practical application of creative thought?" -- Bob Filipczak. Is it the difference between discovery and invention? Or expression versus invention? Art is Expression, not an invention. An electric bulb is an invention, not an expression. Invention generally serves some specific purpose of the greater populace. Expression is a fulfillment of a personal desire. During the Renaissance, inventors and artists, creative expression and innovation were almost synonymous. Think of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
Today perhaps with so much specialisation, we see few Renaissance Men and fewer Renaissance teams."
I don’t know if she saw my subsequent post on this subject, but my “think of creativity as an individual enterprise and innovation as a group enterprise” does kind of dovetail with her observation of invention (innovation) as a purpose-driven activity and expression (creativity) as the fulfillment of a personal desire.
I wonder if when she says “specialization” she is thinking in terms of business specialization or in terms of people specializing in either invention or expression but not both. Either of these, I suppose, could lead to “fewer Renaissance men (and women!) and Renaissance teams.”
And that would be a shame. I believe there is a difference between innovation and creativity, though I don’t know if I have it very well described yet. And I think we need three kinds of people: We need a mix of inventors, expressors and people who are called to do and be both. In a word, Renaissance people: inventive expressors, expressive inventors; innovative creators and creative innovators.
We can’t necessarily be Renaissance-ian investigators, though. All aspects of these separate entities -- innovation and creativity -- must be examined in order to understand the whole. It strikes me that this is what we’re all doing -- when Joyce writes about the discipline of innovation, Henry about open innovation, John about interfirm innovation, and myself about ideas and creativity, I suspect we’re all trying to understand the parts that make up the whole.
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Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
In the last post I mentioned Dina Mehta’s blog. It’s well worth checking out, especially this post on why/how blogs are good for/in the business world:
"My husband who's a die-hard 'company man', a Senior Executive in a Multinational firm, who 'not-so-quietly' has been observing my preoccupation with blogging, surprised me. He's the kind of guy that wants to see 'immediate action' - a return on investment - a firm contract for instance, as a result of the time i spend networking online and blogging. The more 'intangibles' like learning, growing from connecting with people and minds across the world, accelerating knowledge and change as a result, don't make that much sense to him - its the way he's been conditioned by management school and the workplace.
I shared with him some of the exchanges i've been having with many people across the world - connections made through our respective blogs. I also showed him a few blogs by people employed by large companies - let him have control over the mouse - it was really fascinating to observe how he got more and more absorbed in reading, clicking on links, reading some more ....
At the end of this little session, i asked him three questions:
- would he feel more comfortable now, having read his blog, approaching this person as a potential client, for business?
- would he feel more comfortable interacting with his own colleagues - not just those working with him directly - but peers across offices countrywide and globally - if they had such blog-like spaces?
- can he see how such connections - either with a potential client or with a set of colleagues - can indeed help accelerate growth?
And his answer to all three, with a bit of wonder, was an unequivocal YES!"
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June 12, 2003
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
Renee ... thanks for continuing this conversation. I agree ... creativity is more than idea fluency and innovation is more than project management. While some people dismiss this as "semantics," I think it's important to understand the terms and the relationship between them ... at least for those of us who are trying to advance the discipline of innovation. As we developed, reworked and reworked again the InnovationDNA over the years, we realized that creativity is a piece of innovation (using a life/human body metaphor, I think of it as the brain of innovation), critical, but only one of several critical elements -- the others being:
- Challenge (what we're trying to change or accomplish -- the "pull"),
- Customer Focus (we have to be creating value for someone -- the "push"),
- Creativity (generating and sharing ideas is everyone's job -- the "brain")
- Communication (the flow of information and ideas is the "lifeblood"),
- Collaboration (innovation is only done by people working together -- the "heart"),
- Completion (implementing the new ideas -- the "muscle"),
Contemplation (learning and sharing lessons leads to ever higher competency -- the "ladder"),
- Culture (the playing field of innovation) includes:
- Leadership (sees the possibilities and positions the team for action -- the role model)
- People (diverse groups of radically empowered people innovate -- the source of innovation)
- Basic Values (trust and respect define and distinguish an innovation organization -- the backbone)
- Innovation Values (certain values stoke the fires that make the impossible possible -- the spark)
- Context (innovation is shaped by interactions with the world)
A recent Harvard alert stated that 70% of all business initiatives fail. That is a horrifying thought that plays out in human terms as well as bottom line terms -- lost jobs, stress, untapped or misused skills and talents, and lost opportunities to improve our organizations and the world.
I think a huge part of this high level of failure is not understanding the underlying principles of all change initiatives. Our culture is so focused on doing that we jump into projects and initiatives without understanding the ramifications of our actions. We look for "best practices" that we can replicate rather than understanding the principles and then thinking about how we can forward the principles within the unique environment of each organization. Then, six months later when we don't have the results we wanted, we brush our hands together and say, "Well, we tried innovation (or quality, or continuous improvement, or ...) and that didn't work." If we understood the principles, we would know that the problem wasn't the principle, it was the implementation and we could keep moving forward in our own way toward the ideal of the principle.
Clay Christensen talked in the same vein recently in a Harvard teleconference about the importance of sound theories. It's easy for writers in this area to study a few companies and synthesize a few practices into a "best practice" or theory. One best practice does not make a theory or a principle.
And I'm sure I've gone on too long about this. It's a bit of a hot button!
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Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I hit one of Joyce's hot buttons, pretty much the first time out! And it turns out that *lots* of people I’ve talked to lately about this issue are somewhat confused about it.
One person likened "innovation vs creativity" to "marketing vs sales." She said, a lot of people thinking marketing and sales are the same thing, and they’re not. Sales is marketing, but marketing encompasses and surpasses sales. Creativity is innovation, but innovation encompasses and surpasses creativity.
Another train of thought: Consider creativity as an individual enterprise and innovation as a group enterprise. That’s obviously somewhat arbitrary as a distinction, but when you shine that light on the concepts, some interesting stuff comes up. For one thing, the individual/group metaphor allows for a consideration of innovation as not just project management, but as creativity harnessed. Creativity then becomes the power source, and innovation the harness that gathers and focuses the power.
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Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Joyce's post on the elements of innovation bears some serious thought. Coincidentally, at almost the same time she posted, I received an interesting email from an IdeaFlow reader about the importance of communication in innovation (communication, of course, was one of the elements of innovation she discussed in her post).
It was such a good email, in fact, that I'm going to quote it, even though the reader in question is my ex-husband! Here he is on the importance of communication in corporate innovation:
What I see as the big hurdle for most creative endeavors is establishing an effective communications system. Thousands of words are subject to as many perceived meanings as "creativity" and "innovation." Getting all the members of a functional unit on the same page about what their organizaitional language is, in precise detail, isn't easy.
Lousy comms has been my number one pet peeve all my professional life, and I don't think many organizations do them well. Dozens of times, I've seen a new idea pitched and proven in one corner of a firm but never effectively transmitted and taught to the rest of the organization, leaving potential productivity completely wasted.
Worse yet, when the new idea was introduced without detailed clarity and supporting structure, it was actually counterproductive. It usually works better to maintain the status quo than do a half-ass job of trying to innovate.
In my many sermonettes about this over the years, I've used a musical analogy, as you might imagine: Writing a good song is a fine creative accomplishment, but performing the song with voice and guitar or piano is a pretty simple external communications exercise. Teaching a four-piece band to perform the song effectively is far more complex. Teaching an orchestra to perform it well is very complex. Try creating an effective performance with musicians that either aren't accomplished or are inexperienced with the associated genre, and the task is darn near impossible.
If the communications systems that support a creative product aren't working so hot, the creation isn't going to be what it could be.
Without Pete Anderson, Dwight Yoakam's songs wouldn't have become Dwight Yoakam records as we've known them. In a lot of companies I've worked for, Dwight's songs would have been turned into records that sounded like Barry Manilow or Tiny Tim, and most members of the organization would have had no idea what they were missing.
As talented and creatively brilliant as Dwight is, I don't think he'd have gotten to the "Dwight Yoakam sound" himself without Pete, and his songs would have led different lives. However you'd classify Pete's contributions as a producer/communicator vis a vis "creative," he sure makes a difference. I say the world needs a lot more Pete Andersons! -- Tom Kinsey
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June 9, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Joyce said something in her first post that has really had me thinking: "Our intent then was to help people understand that to do innovation well, you had to do a lot more than just come up with a bunch of ideas ... that there was a significant difference between creativity and innovation."
Maybe I can get Joyce to expand on that, but in the meantime, I looked around and found this (emphasis mine):
" 'People always tend to use the terms innovation andcreativity interchangeably. We're very clear about the linkages and the distinction. Creativity is getting the great ideas, it's sort of the R&D, and everybody is creative, everybody has got great ideas, every organisation has more great ideas than it can ever implement or bring into the marketplace.' Innovation, however, is 'creativity implemented', he [Arnold Wasserman of The Idea Factory] points out. 'It's taking creative ideas and bringing them into the world so that they change lives, and so they also change the organisations that bring them into the world.' "
The quote above come from an Asia Business Times article published April 8, 2003 (original article is now archived -- the link is to a Google cache page, so check it out before it goes away!. I couldn't find a working link to The Idea Factory, a Singapore-based consultancy founded by John Kao).
This seems to be something of a facile distinction that relegates creativity only to idea fluency, and relegates innovation only to some advanced form of project management. So I don't think that's it, and I don't think that's what Joyce had in mind either.
But it's an interesting starting place for a discussion. Is some innovation more creative than others, some creativity more innovative? What makes an idea innovative? Simply that it can be implemented within a company's business model? That it leads to a "disruptive" business model or technology? What's the difference between a creative idea and an un-creative idea?
And no, I'm not just playing around with words (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I'll be thinking and writing more on this.
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June 5, 2003
Posted by Joyce Wycoff
Note: Joyce Wycoff is the last to join the new, improved group-blog version of IdeaFlow. This is her first post.
Greetings Renee, John and Henry ... it is great to join such an illustrious group that I've already learned so much from. In case you wonder about my background, in my former life I was a financial manager for several companies, large and small. I credit my awakening to Tom Peters' (where is Waterman anyway?) In Search of Excellence (which, by the way, is still ranked about 5,000 by amazon.com -- much higher than most current business books ... but not as high as our own Henry's great contribution, Open Innovation.)
Once I discovered, and became somewhat obsessed by, creativity, I started writing about it and ten years ago founded the InnovationNetwork as a place for people to share ideas and experiences ... probably similar motivations to the founding of IdeaFlow.
What I'm thinking about primarily now is the "discipline" of innovation. It seems to me that we are in a similar position to quality in the early 80s ... lots of talk, not so much walk. One of the first things we did as part of our work in the InnovationUniversity (in addition to talking folks around to study innovative organizations) was to develop a framework of innovation principles called the InnovationDNA (available for download at www.thinksmart.com). Our intent then was to help people understand that to do innovation well, you had to do a lot more than just come up with a bunch of ideas ... that there was a significant difference between creativity and innovation.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to map the tools, practices, principles and systems that support innovation into a coherent whole that will help budding innovators know what to do next. I'd love to hear your ideas about this.
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June 2, 2003
Posted by Henry Chesbrough
John Wolpert described his activities at IBM. I personally find what he is doing to be remarkable, and I marvel that more companies don't do the same.
Here's why: when it comes to R&D, companies think nothing of designing various experiments to test out various possible technical combinations of features or components. Companies have become quite savvy in designing these tests, in monitoring their results, and in making important decisions based on the results of those tests. Companies even keep track of their portfolio of development projects, and have a sense of how the collection of possible future products is faring within the company. This gives them early warnings about a lack of new products down the road, in time for them to take corrective action.
However, those same companies have no similar set of practices outside of the technical realm, when it comes to the business decisions that they must make. There, the dominant logic is to proceed according to the business model that the company is currently operating. In many companies, this approach is called "feeding the beast", or "fueling the business". What it means in practice is, "if it doesn't fit our business, either change it so it does, or drop it".
The alternative to this myopia is to test alternative business models that might make better, more valuable use of a technology project. Yet this is what most companies don't know how to do, and have no process for doing. As a result, they have little or no sense of how they might grow beyond their current business. There is no visibility - or early warning - of a business reaching the end of its growth. And think of how many innovative, high technology companies there are these days that are desperate for growth!
Enter John Wolpert, and IBM's Extreme Blue. While I have not visited these guys in person yet, I have admired them from over the web and through casual conversations. And what this unit is trying to do is to experiment with business models - alternative ways of configuring technologies to serve possible different markets - the way that IBM experiments with future technologies.
And look at who they employ to do this experimentation. These are not your father's IBM employees. Often, they are only summer IBM employees. They are usually young, probably inexperienced, probably very energetic, and haven't yet learned what won't work. Precisely the kind of people you'd like to have doing experiments: people who don't already think they know the answer.
So I applaud Extreme Blue, and what it is trying to do. I wonder what happens to those experiments, once they are run? What is the "after action review" of these experiments like? How do you report results? How can results change minds and behavior in the Big Businesses within IBM? Notwithstanding, I commend this kind of experimentation to those of you who sense that there must be other ways to do business beyond your current model.
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June 1, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
A couple of weeks ago I waxed lyrical about Martin Leith’s taxonomy of idea-generation methods, which included a reference to (though sadly not a description of) an idea-generation method called “country music.” If you’ve read IdeaFlow for a while you know that country music is very near and dear to my heart, and so I was quite taken with that and emailed Martin to see if I could get a description. He replied:
"The 'country music' method was suggested by my friend and collaborator Mo Cohen. It's very simple: Write a few verses of a country song about the issue in hand. It's an alternative to writing a haiku, Bonto (see below) or other poetry form. It's also a bit like the improv game on 'Whose Line Is It Anyway?' where the performers have to create a rap on a theme suggested by an audience member.
Do you know Edward de Bono's "Bonto" form? It's a four-line poem with the following structure:
Line 1: The action that someone took (e.g. 'The boy stood on the table')
Line 2: The reason for the action ('To show that he was able')
Line 3: What happened as a result of the action ('The table soon gave way')
Line 4: The moral of the story ('Showing off does not pay')
Here's a Bonto I wrote:
They kept their inventors locked up in the basement.
'We're number one vendor' they cried. How complacent.
In no time at all they were dead in the water.
So honour invention, necessity's daughter.
I was recently helping another friend and colleague Romy Shovelton run a workshop for one of her clients, a government agency, and as part of the closing session a group of volunteers composed and performed a rap based on some of the major themes that had emerged during the two days."
I see how this works. Haiku, Bonto, rap and country are all formalized lyrics – that is, they each have a specific, recognizable form. So writing a parody or using the form as a take-off to create something new is easier than it would be in a less-formalized lyric.
In haiku the formal structure has to do with the number of syllables per line, and in rap the formal structure has to do with rhythm, rhyme and often content. Country is a little different – there the formal structure really has more to do with content, as does the Bonto example Martin sent above. Remember “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” in which the country song’s not perfect yet because the writer hasn’t said anything about “Momma, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin' drunk.” Country song lyrics also trade heavily in puns, such as “Let’s fall to pieces together/Why should we both fall apart?”
One of the nice things about using country music as an idea-generation technique is that you don’t necessarily have to write a whole song to get creative – a title will do. Something like, “Blogging My Heart Out Over You,” maybe?!
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