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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Category Archives
October 12, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
What is an idea, anyway? What’s the unit of thought that constitutes an idea?
These are not an angels-dancing-on-a-pinhead questions – if you are going to systematically come up with ideas, you need to be able to identify them so that they can be evaluated and built on.
This was brought home to me recently during an online ideation project I was running when a client, a senior product manager at a Fortune 500 company, confessed to me that she could not see “where the ideas are.” Meanwhile, looking at the same output from consumers, I had identified more than 200 ideas, many with multiple builds!
According to BIF-2 speaker Rick Borovoy of nTag Interactive, a single idea is “the one thing it has to be in order not to be anything else.” This may sound simplistic, but it actually is true. Ideation is loose, dynamic, free-flowing (one hopes, anyway), but going back to the output to gather the ideas requires the application of logic. There may be five discrete ideas in one long, complex sentence. They have to be identified and separated so that you can figure out where to go with them.
Another idea-related theme – how does one come up with ideas? Innovation star Ivy Ross of Old Navy, formerly of Mattel, addressed this in her story, which was about how she created an environment for collaborative creativity among designers at Old Navy. This was tricky, because she was new and brought new designers with her. She and the new designers needed to be able to connect with the “old” designers. She described a process of fostering connections and relationships between people to build the necessary “atmosphere of freedom and trust and freedom” for innovation. One way she did this was to hire a documentary filmmaker to create short film “biographies” of each person talking about what was important to them everyone, to foster connection. She also brought in improv companies in to teach people how to build on each other’s ideas. So much of creative output, she said, depends on the quality and amount of information input, because creativity is “taking information, rearranging it, connecting it in new ways and spitting it back out” in creative ways. So people must be given information, context, and time to absorb that information.
One last idea-related theme involved making meaning from the intersection of ideas. This is – where meaning is. For Jane Fulton Suri of Ideo, meaning comes from a blend of rational and intuitive thinking. Suri is at heart a researcher, and since research gets such a bad rap (unfairly, in my opinion), she talked of wanting to redefine research for innovation.
I completely agree with her that research has an important role to play in innovation. Research after all is the gathering of information, or input, such as Ross talked about. Suri spoke of doing “research in a forward thinking way – going out into the world looking at reality and making sense of it” then letting that spark the imagination. The process here is “looking for patterns and themes that take us into looking at possibilities for the future.”
For Suri, too much research thinking is focused on rational thinking models, while too little is focused on intuition. This to me is not just another call to ditch focus groups and do more observational research and ethnography! My take on this is that for a disciplined thinker, the blend of rational thinking and intuitive thinking necessary to use research as a springboard for innovation is possible regardless of the source of the data input.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: BIF-2 | Idea Generation
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
One of the strongest themes at BIF-2 was that of community -- building community and of things/ideas being built/created by communities. Community seems to be to be at the same time too big and not big enough of a word to describe what’s been called “customer co-creation,” “community marketing,” “wisdom of crowds” and “crowdsourcing.” To unpack this theme of “community,” I’ll talk about some of the specific BIF-2 storytellers.
Tim Westergren talked of creating Pandora.com as an interface to connect musicians and listeners, thus creating a community. Part of the greatness of Pandora, though, is that music is always being suggested by the community to the end of bettering the mix of the individual “stations,” and then once it’s in the Pandora database, it’s available for recommendation to others in the community. There are also community stations – BIF-2 had one, and it would have been cool for the facility to have played it during the networking/discussion times.
Pandora.com is definitely about service, and Jeanneane Rae of Peer Insight talked about the customer-focus of the service innovation movement. Service is “about experience not product, which is a customer-focused kind of thinking. ….When you buy a service you buy a whole experience – so it must be customer centric.”
Diane Hessan of Communispace talked of creating online marketing communities as a way of understanding the people who buy your product, a way of walking in their shoes rather than assuming you know what they want. There are many ways to do this, but Communispace’s privately built custom communities are probably the most intimate way a company can connect to its customers in real time. If the community is specifically for a company, there’s great opportunity for these customers to share their opinions, thoughts, and ideas in any number of ways that could benefit the company *and* the customers themselves.
An example of how this would work came from Alice Wilder of Think-It-Ink-It, who talked about her work with the children’s TV show “Blue’s Clues”. She said “When you’re making a product, you need to ask your consumer what they think about your product as you make it.” This approach was more about shaping the product in progress – which requires a trusting and somewhat dynamic, not static, relationship between company and its community.
Author Bill Taylor, a co-founder of Fast Company, spoke of “tapping into the brainpower of your customers” by “establishing a platform in which everyone else does the work (!) He called this an “architecture of participation” whose driving question would be “what kind of social system can I create that will bring more smart people into my organization to contribute ideas?” Another driving question he mentioned – “Am I the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” And, if the answer to that is “no!” I suppose the next question might be “In what ways might I become the kind of person that other smart people want to rally around and work with?” !!
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: BIF-2 | Collaborative Creativity | Crowdsourcing | Customer Co-Creation | Customer Viewpoint | Idea Generation | Marketing Research
June 6, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
">My post on the BusinessWeek TRIZ article has had a fair amount of comment, including one I will quote here, as it came to me in an email from TRIZ consultant Jack Hipple, with whom I have had a smattering of TRIZ training. Says Jack:
"I loved this quote:
'It seems to me that TRIZ is trying to create an equation for innovation,' says Harry West, the company's vice-president of strategy & innovation. 'I think it's a great aspiration. But if there's an equation for innovation out there, your competitor can do the same -- which means the competitive challenge can easily be lost.' '
That IS the whole point of TRIZ and this guy should be appropriately afraid. The reason we don't have to use trial and error to solve quadratic equations anymore is that algebra was discovered as a mathematical science A lot of fast guessers were put out of business. There is much less mystery than this guy thinks, and when more of the world discovers they don't need a magician (as opposed to a logical process that anyone can learn--ie science and not psychlogy) he will have a rude awakening as others in the engineering world have discovered. Egos are a terrible thing to waste...."
As for me, I'd like to think that there's a middle ground -- there's a little more mystery to innovation than the TRIZ enthusiasts say, and there's a lot more process to innovation than some of the professional creatives think.
You can read the rest of the comments at the end of the original post.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Idea Generation | TRIZ
June 1, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I like TRIZ, though I admit it intimidates me, despite Jack Hipple's best training efforts! Yet as much as I like TRIZ, here's a day I never thought I'd see -- Business Week featuring an article on this formerly obscure Russian idea-generation technique. Yet here it is: The World According to TRIZ -- " With 'innovation' such a hot buzzword in business circles these days, companies are scrambling to find the magic formula for creating inventive products and services. One method that's gaining converts -- and breeding skeptics -- is a 60-year-old theory known as TRIZ." And just prior to that my blogger friend Olivier Blanchard sent me a link to a post on TRIZ in a blog called Swamp Fox that is associated with the Southeastern Innovation Corridor. According to the post, three-day certification courses in Inventive Problem Solving, which is Ideation International's flavor ofTRIZ, are being offered to entrepreneurs by the University of South Carolina.
The BusinessWeek article doesn't get into much detail, but deftly points out the pros and cons. Pros: it's structured innovation: "This could be a parallel to Six Sigma," the article quotes Insourcing Innovation co-author David Silverstein. Yet the other quotes in the article that support this muddy up the idea of a structure for coming up with ideas -- which is what TRIZ is -- with a structure for developing innovation. Example: "When asked if 'structured innovation" à la TRIZ is a contradiction in terms, Stowell [Davin Stowell, founder and chief executive of New York-based Smart Design, a leading product-design firm] defends the general idea. 'Innovation absolutely needs to be structured to finish a project. Or else you wander all over the place.' "
On the opposite side: "some product-design firms approach TRIZ with caution. One of them is Design Continuum. 'It seems to me that TRIZ is trying to create an equation for innovation,' says Harry West, the company's vice-president of strategy & innovation. 'I think it's a great aspiration. But if there's an equation for innovation out there, your competitor can do the same -- which means the competitive challenge can easily be lost.' "
As usual in these kinds of stories that sum up something complicated by offering quotes from opposing views, the real truth is somewhere in the middle. TRIZ is a great tool for making connections in a structured way that allows you to leave no stone unturned. It will not come up with ideas for you, but it will help you come up with ideas. It won't help you evaluate them, or design a process for developing them into products, services, etc.
And since you must supply the input -- the basic challenge and the "Ideal Final Result" -- it will ikely be different from anyone else's, which will result in different answers. In fact, if you define the Ideal Final Result to the degree of rigor that I've been told you have to do, it will be extremely idiosyncratic to you and the problelm that you and only you are trying to solve. Thus the objection that TRIZ is an "equation for innovation" is somewhat spurious.
I do like the "last word" quote, again from David Silverstein: " 'Look, TRIZ is not the answer to everything. It's just one approach to innovation.' "
If there's anything that will keep TRIZ from wide aoption, it's that it's fairly complicated and rigorous. But that just means there are people out there like David Silverstein, Ideation International, and Jack Hipple, who'll help you learn it and apply it. If they find TRIZ valuable enough, businesses will pay for the service of being guided through the forest of TRIZ.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Idea Generation
January 26, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 4 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
What Goes Inside The Box?
The Fuzzy Front End should not be the place where go/no go decisions are made about ideas. But it can provide an environment where more viable ideas are generated. And, we would argue, the best way to provide that environment is to utilize the power of working inside rather than outside the box – power that comes from the very parameters, or constraints, the box provides.
There are no hard and fast rules about what the parameters of the box should be, but there are some things that might make sense to have in the box as constraints. For example, mission and vision statements provide excellent, high-level parameters for generating ideas. In order for an idea to have a chance of being successful, it should support the overall mission of the company and its vision.
Strategic imperatives represent the things your company simply must do – they are table stakes. For example, if your company provides local business information to consumers, then it is essential for that information to be accurate and timely. Strategic imperatives can offer solid boundaries within which to develop actionable, relevant ideas.
In order for an idea to be successful, it should support whatever it is you want say about your company, both internally and externally. So brand strategy and branding attributes might be important constraints to place in the box.
Any metrics that will be used to evaluate your performance and that of your team should be considered when building the box. And any other facts that are relevant to the success of an idea, such as the competitive environment, regulatory issues, and resource constraints, might serve as valuable guidelines for generating unique ideas that might meet the needs of the business.
Bringing Others Into The Box
Here’s a common assumption made in the Fuzzy Front End: “The best people in the industry work for us. They’ll be a great source of ideas.” But as Henry Chesbrough, author of Open Innovation, points out:
• Not all of the smart people in the industry work for you.
• No one has a monopoly on useful knowledge.
• Good ideas are widely distributed.
In other words, it’s best not to be the only one in the box; invite others in, such as industry and subject matter experts, lead users, mainstream customers, and consumers who are not your customers.
We’ve found it’s best to be highly selective about who you invite into your box. Involve subject matter and industry experts who embrace collaborative and mutually beneficial relationships. And invite customers and consumers to participate who are articulate and able to contribute new, far-reaching ideas that stimulate your own thinking.
Benefits Beyond The Fuzzy Front End
We mentioned that staying in the box is an approach that can benefit the entire development process. Because the structure of the box is based on business needs and constraints, the ideas generated inside the box would be influenced by those same things. As a result, the ideas generated inside the box should be more actionable and relevant to the business than if they had been generated outside the box.
If the ideas that move from the Fuzzy Front End into the next stage of development are more actionable and relevant, that should reduce the need for screening, filtering, and assessing a large number of low quality ideas that don’t meet the needs of the business. This means fewer resources could be allocated to the development process. Additionally, if we assume that the initial ideas address the needs of the business, we should see an increase in the number of ideas that could be brought to market successfully.
Is There A Time To Work Out-Of-The-Box?
We have found that out-of-the-box thinking has its place, and it can add value to the development process, especially in situations where novelty in and of itself is the primary goal. Additionally, there is some value in beginning the idea generation process with few constraints in order to lower inhibitions and barriers, particularly in a group setting.
But more often than not, there will always be some “box” (either spoken or unspoken) to operate within. Once out-of-the-box thinking has served its kick-starting purpose, novelty by itself will be insufficient. Perhaps Dr. de Bono summed it up best when he said: “[To have true value,] the creative idea must make sense and must work.” We would say, the goal of the Fuzzy Front End is to create ideas that are highly innovative yet make sense and will work within your product development process. And the best way to do this is to stay in the box.
PREVIOUSLY:
Part 1, Introduction
Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
Part 3, Why Staying In The Box Is A Good Thing
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | White papers
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 3 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
Why Staying In The Box Is A Good Thing
Although staying in the box is not a widely used approach, it certainly is a highly respected one. One of the world’s leading experts on creative thinking had this to say about idea generation as many of us might define it:
“There are far too many practitioners out there who believe that creativity is just brainstorming and being free to suggest crazy ideas. Creative thinking is different from normal thinking. It is not just normal thinking that is more free.
“...If we suspend judgment, feel innocent and childlike, and try to use the right side of the brain, should we not then be creative? We will certainly be more creative than before, but not very much more. We will be able to use our natural creativity. Unfortunately, natural creativity is not very powerful.
“It is not enough to be innocent and uninhibited and to have a creative attitude. The normal behavior of the brain in perception is to set up routine patterns and to follow these. In order to cut across patterns we can use deliberate techniques ... These techniques can be learned, practiced, and used deliberately.”
Serious Creativity, Dr. Edward de Bono
Creativity Inside The Box
As Dr. de Bono states, we will be creative, at least to a degree, if we allow ourselves free reign to come up with whatever sounds unique and original. In this way we will usually come up with a few new and innovative ideas. But by staying in the box, we force our brains to acknowledge reality, and we dig down beyond the obvious. In this way, we will come up with greater numbers of ideas, and these ideas will be not only new and innovative, they will also be more likely to work within our reality.
When we venture outside the box, the lack of constraints actually can work to our detriment. If we are given permission to wander and ignore the constraints of the business, the result can be lots of ideas that span a very broad range, but that are shallow and not highly actionable.
In the past few years, TLC’s Trading Spaces has been one of the most popular reality shows in America. What was it that made the show so irresistible to viewers? Was it the creativity of the designs or the drastic nature of the makeovers? In part, yes. But if those were the only reasons, why weren’t shows such as Designing for the Sexes or Homes Across America just as popular?
What truly set Trading Spaces apart was the fact that every one of those amazing transformations was the result of creative thinking that took place inside a well-defined box:
1. The design budget was held to $1,000.
2. The timeframe in which to create the new look was limited to two days.
3. The work was done by one designer, one carpenter, and two homeowners.
Because the teams were forced to work within the constraints of budget, time, and resources, their designs were much more innovative than if they had been allowed the freedom to change the shape of the box, or ignore it altogether. Do you really think we would have seen chandeliers made of tree branches sprayed with silver paint and wrapped with Christmas tree lights if the homeowners had been given larger budgets?
MasterCard represents another example of creativity inside the box. For a good portion of the 1990s, Visa was the undisputed leader in the credit card industry, in large part due to its “And They Don’t Take American Express” campaign. The ads were designed to appeal to consumers’ desires to experience the best in life, to reach a level of achievement beyond that which most people could ever hope to enjoy – sort of a “you-are-what-you-buy” position.
MasterCard, on the other hand, had launched five different advertising campaigns within a decade, none of which had provided the brand with anything it could claim as its own. So, the company took a step back and examined the box in which it lived. Then, it created a campaign that built on the virtues of that box – the “Priceless” campaign.
Rather than positioning itself as the card that could give people the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it focused on enhancing the quality of consumers’ every day lives. The company’s 2004 annual report refers to the positioning as “the better way to pay for everything that matters.” As a result, there were 16,700,000,000 MasterCard transactions around the world in 2004, growth to which the company attributes in large part to its “Priceless” campaign.
PREVIOUSLY:
Part 1, Introduction
Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
NEXT: Part 4, What Goes Inside the Box
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Innovation, General | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | New Products | White papers
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 2 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
When working in the Fuzzy Front End, it’s not uncommon to set a goal of generating as many unusual, original ideas as possible. Most often, people seek to meet this objective by “thinking outside the box” – by ignoring business boundaries that typically are considered to be immovable and unbreakable.
Consider the following challenge: Using a crayon, connect the nine dots shown in the following image with as few continuous lines as possible.
The second illustration demonstrates how the problem can be solved if one is allowed literally to go outside the boundaries of the box:
The third illustration shows that another way to connect the nine dots with even fewer continuous lines is to change the shape of the box altogether – to totally alter the boundaries that define the box:
The fourth illustration shows that yet another way to connect the nine dots with the fewest number of lines possible is to stay inside the box – to acknowledge the boundaries of the box and see them as enablers rather than inhibitors. By peeling the wrapper off the crayon, turning it sideways, and swiping the crayon down over the nine dots, the result is that all nine dots are connected with a single line, without changing the shape of the box, nor going outside its parameters:
How is the nine-dot exercise relevant to those of us who are responsible for working in the Fuzzy Front End? Well, it certainly shows that unique and innovative solutions can be generated if one is allowed to think outside the box and/or to change the box altogether. But in the real world, we seldom have the luxury of being able to ignore the parameters of the business – the box. And often, if we try to generate new and original ideas by disregarding the environment in which we operate, those ideas turn out to be useless when it comes to developing new products and services.
So, as counterintuitive as this may seem, perhaps the objective when working in the Fuzzy Front End is not to generate as many original ideas as possible. Perhaps the true goal should be to generate a large number of unique ideas that are relevant and actionable – ideas that can be successfully used to meet the needs of the business.
PREVIOUSLY: Part 1, Introduction
NEXT: Part 3, Why Staying In The Box is a Good Thing
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | White papers
January 25, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Part 1 of a four-part series from the paper Looking for Ideas in All the Wrong Places, An Argument for Staying in the Box, by Gwen Smith Ishmael and Renee Hopkins Callahan
 Many issues are still debated when it comes to new product innovation, but fortunately marketers and product developers seem to have stopped debating the issue of whether or not it’s important to keep the product and service development pipelines full. This is critically important. Study after study has demonstrated that new product and service success is relatively rare, such as the London Dun and Bradstreet study in which the accompanying chart was found. As the chart indicates, for every profitable new product, there are approximately sixty ideas or concepts that do not make it to market successfully.
Much has been said regarding the importance of having a structured, repeatable process for new product and service development. Experts such as Dr. Robert Cooper and his colleagues have spent countless hours laboring on defining exactly what such a development process should look like, resulting in charts now familiar to many new product developers.
Yet even Dr. Cooper has stated,
“Don’t expect a well-oiled new product process to make up for a shortage of quality ideas: if the idea was mundane to start with, don’t count on your process turning it into a star!” Optimizing the Stage-Gate Process. What Best Practice Companies are Doing – Part 1, Cooper, R., Edgett, S., Kleinschmidt, E., 2002
So while there’s not much debate that success in the Idea Stage, or the Fuzzy Front End as it’s often called, is critical to the success of a new product development and innovation program, there’s still a great deal of discussion about why the Fuzzy Front End is such a challenging part of the product or service development process. Perhaps this is because, unlike other portions of the development process, more time has been spent in this sort of discussion compared to the relatively small amount of time that has been spent defining how to make the Fuzzy Front End more efficient and productive. Or perhaps it’s because of the still-pervasive notion that ideas are just supposed to “appear” from customers, or employees, or from some corporate initiative encouraging people to be creative and innovative.
It’s our experience that it is possible to structure the Fuzzy Front End in such a way that it not only produces innovative results, but that those results can positively affect the entire development process.
NEXT: Part 2, The Goal of the Fuzzy Front End
[Technorati Tags: innovation ideas creativity new product development]
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Creativity | Customer Viewpoint | Idea Generation | In the box innovation | Innovation, General | Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places | New Products | White papers
April 22, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I received a lovely email a few days ago from Charles Cave in Sydney, Australia, whose Creativity Web site (http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/Creative/) has been a often-consulted resource for me for several years. Charles offered up his list of idea generation techniques as a source from which I could fill in some of the holes in my own Compendium of Ideda Generation Techniques (http://www.ideaflow.com/ideagen.htm).
I'll alert you all as I make updates to the Compendium. For now, I want to point you to Charles' site and tell you that I've made some changes to the list of links at the bottom of the Compendium page. I've removed a few dead links, and added links to Charles' idea generation techniques page (http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/Creative/Techniques/) and to Alain Rostain's (http://www.creativeadvantage.com/ideation_techniques_overview.html).
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| Category: Idea Generation
March 25, 2004
Posted by
Renee, what a huge and wonderful list! I didn't cross-reference, but if you
want to look at
http://www.creativeadvantage.com/ideation_techniques_overview.html, there may be a couple not on your list.
Also, as the "Improv in Business" guy, I can tell you there are many ways
that improv exercises can and are being used to help with ideation.
I saw that Playback theater was on the list. There are hundreds of playback companies around the world. The site for the network (or one of the networks) is http://www.playbacknet.org/iptn/index.htm. I wouldn't be able to do justice to it in a description, since I am not a playback practitioner, but I know some people who could. I have seen it, several times. It uses performance to act as a cathartic experience for the audience, usually with a conductor who interviews one of the audience to tell their story so that it can be seen (or seen with a different ending) on stage.
Note: Alain Rostain of Creative Advantage is a new contributor to IdeaFlow.
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| Category: Idea Generation
March 24, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Last summer I discovered Martin Leith's Compendium of Idea Generation Methods. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter Martin removed it from his site and declared himself free of the need to "make models and concepts." But he did give me permission to publish the Compendium myself.
Now, almost a year -- and a site and publishing-system upgrade -- later, the Compendium has a new web home. The page may still contain a few homeless links. If you find one, please do let me know. And if you have anything to add, please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy!
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| Category: Idea Generation
May 9, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Joyce Wycoff of the Innovation Network did an informal survey of her newsletter readers, asking them to rate idea-generation tools and techniques. In true geek fashion, I’ve taken the survey results and tried an analysis based on the taxonomy in the Compendium of Idea Generation Techniques I wrote about this week.
Here are the results from 61 responses. In the parentheses, the first number is how many people responded that they were familiar with the technique; the second number is the average rating the respondents gave the technique, using the following scale: 1 = highly effective; 2 = moderately effective; 3 = no particular effect; 4 = more of a hindrance. I’ve ordered them in terms of reported effectiveness.
Creative Problem Solving (31/1.6) - C
Brainstorming (58/1.7) - I
Mindmapping (35/1.7) - I
'Wouldn’t It Be Nice If ...?' (35/1.7) - CR
Visualization (27/1.7) - E
Changing Perspective Or Place (27/1.8) - S
Storytelling (34/1.8) - E
Metaphorical Thinking (31/2.0) - S
SCAMPER (22/2.0) - S
Collage (21/2.1) - S
6 Thinking Hats (24/2.1) - ASM
Mindmanager (14/2.1) - I
Using Random Images To Stimulate Thoughts (27/2.2) - S
Forced Associations (25/2.2) - S
Stupid & Ridiculous (19/2.5) - I
Forced Quotas (19/2.7) - I
Knowbrainer (8/2.7) - S
Ideafisher (10/2.8) - I
Many, but not all, of these techniques can all be found in the Compendium of Idea Generation Techniques (I had to guess at a few). When I placed them in that taxonomy, I came up with these results: Of the 18 techniques listed here, two -- Storytelling and Visualization, listed in bold -– represent various aspects of Worldview 3 (the world is a field of energy and consciousness). One, Creative Problem Solving, listed in italics, represents Worldview 2 (the world is an ecosystem) because it is a “macro” process that collects together many micro processes (which are themselves categorized in Worldviews 1 and 3). The power of CPS, as in all Worldview 2 methods, is that very macro process-ness, as well as the fact that they harness the power of a group - “members of a stakeholder system work together to bring something new into being.”
The other 15 idea-generation techniques on the survey list represent various aspects of Worldview 1 (the world is a machine). No surprise there, as even the Compendium authors acknowledge that “the vast majority of idea generation methods in existence are a product of Worldview 1 thinking…if you want to have a brilliant idea, you must produce a large number of ideas and the brilliant one will be in there somewhere.”
Of Worldview 3 (the world is a field of energy and consciousness) the Compendium says: “[these] mostly involve the use of self as the idea generation method. Their purpose is threefold: raising the level of consciousness, enabling the innovator to be fully present, and activating spontaneity and inspiration.”
That letter at the end of each idea-generation technique in the list above indicates the category to which I decided that technique belongs within the Compendium's Worldviews. Although the sample here is really too small to be useful for analytical purposes, and this is not what the survey was intended to do anyway, I did figure up an average for each category in an effort to find out which worldview/categories were most effective.
In the results below, WV indicates the worldview number, then the category is named. Within the parentheses are the number of techniques on the list that belonged to this category and the average score received.
WV2/Collaborative (1/1.6)
WV1/Constraint Removal (1/1.7)
WV3/Experiential (2/1.75)
WV1/Springboards (7/2.1)
WV1/Anchoring and Spatial Marking (1/2.1)
WV1/Inventory Making (6/2.25)
What does this all mean? In some small way I think this is proof of the value of collaborative, macro processes for generating ideas and stimulating creativity and innovation.
What I’d like to do now is to categorize the processes and techniques in the Compendium differently. My as-yet-unwritten taxonomy would group idea-generation methods by which are individual processes and which are social processes; which are analog processes (performed with a pencil and a notebook, or easel pads and markers) and which are digital processes (performed with various kinds of software). Obviously I'd place blogs and social software on the list as digital tools for facilitating collaborative creativity.
I'd want to know how idea generation techniques change when they are performed in a group, as opposed to how they are performed by an individual? Which techniques only work individually and which only work in groups? Which get better results when done in a group, and which get better results when done alone? Which work (or even work better) when transformed from individual to group technique, by using social software?
I realize I've raised more questions here than I've provided answers. All comments welcome!
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| Category: Idea Generation
May 7, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Sure, I love innovation and creativity, but I have a secret passion, a nigh-uncontrollable lust, for….order. My guilty secret reading pleasure? Consumer Reports, with their luscious descriptions of exactly how they tested those toaster ovens (“We placed slices of white bread across the surface of the oven rack and then measured how many square centimeters of bread were burned at the highest “toast” setting….”). My guilty secret writing-subject pleasure? Bluegrass music, of course, but I’ve also, often, fallen into that blissful flow experience while writing procedures manuals. (Note: I’ve rarely ever met anyone remotely like me in this regard, but if you have, and if that person is a single man, let me know!)
So imagine how jazzed I was to discover this exceedingly well-ordered taxonomy on idea generation methods, put together by consultants from Martin Leith Limited in Brighton, England. The authors organized a hundred or so idea generation methods into a somewhat hierarchical framework of different worldviews:
- Worldview 1: The world is a machine
- Worldview 2: The world is an ecosystem
- Worldview 3: The world is a field of energy and consciousness. (Be still my heart! It’s tagmemics!)
My lustful ravings about the taxonomy aside, this is a great resource for idea-generation techniques. I counted 128 methods listed (although a few are cross-references). And if this authors’ disclaimer describes you -- “It is inevitable that people will disagree with some of our categorisation decisions. So be it. The taxonomy is intended to give some coherence to a complex subject. If you find any aspect of it annoying or unhelpful, our advice is that you simply acknowledge this and let it go.” -- then you’ll be pleased to know that there is also an alphabetical list of the idea-generation methods and descriptions. And the authors do say they welcome input on any idea generation methods they may have left out.
Oh yes -- at the end the alphabetized list there are 15 more idea-generation techniques listed under the heading “More will be written about these methods soon.” On this list of 15 was country music!!! No, really!!! As much of a country music “expert” as I like to think I am, I have never heard of it as an offical idea-generation method. Though I personally have come up with many a fine idea after spending an evening drinking Shiner and listening to a honky-tonk band.
So anyway, I'll find out about this country-music idea generation thing and report back. As soon as I calm down!!
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| Category: Idea Generation
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