Best Practices:  Innovation/Creativity

Innovation/Creativity: A Best Practices Overview

Why Creativity is Crucial

Many CEOs and executives consider a focus on creativity to be an exercise in frivolity.

Others recognize that creativity is important, but they see it as unessential.

The most productive leaders incorporate creativity and innovation into their companies with the same predictability as they do profit-and-loss statements.

The four TEC experts interviewed for this series -- Jordan Ayan, Bryan W. Mattimore, Carl Robinson and Steven L. Snyder -- all work with Fortune 500 clients. They say that TEC-size companies often give short shrift to the creative part of themselves, of their companies and of the people who work with them.

"Traditional linear thinking will solve 90 to 95 percent of your problems," says Mattimore. Innovation-enhancing techniques are for the toughest five to 10 percent.

Often, innovation is seen only as a way to add to the top line with new products and services. "TEC members should know that these techniques can also be used to make the business more efficient, to cut costs and to do things quicker, better, smarter," Mattimore says.

Robinson identifies three foundations for organizational innovation. They are:

1. Leadership
2. Training
3. Organizational Openness

To be the "chief innovation officer," you need to:

1. Set a good example for innovation.
2. Encourage the "best thinking possible" from your staff.
3. Make room for crazy ideas.
4. Solicit 360-degree feedback.

Innovation and The Bottom Line

Can you really afford not to place a premium on innovation in your organization?

TEC experts gave us several examples of how encouraging creativity and innovation has had a major bottom-line impact in companies.

• The Catholic Knights of Columbus Insurance Company -- a $100 million business -- used "problem redefinition" to boost sales 52 percent.

• A leather Western wear manufacturer virtually saved its life by brainstorming a new market for their products.

• A comparison of a Japanese- and U.S.-based suggestion program showed that the Japanese respect and encouragement for suggestions resulted in savings of $3,000 per employee.
  
• By simply questioning the assumptions in its problem question, a Big Three U.S. automaker was able to come up with better sales forecasts for its organization.

Engineering Breakthroughs

Mattimore has identified four foundations of breakthrough thinking.

• Questions -- Reframing problems to make sure you are solving the right one.

• Metaphors -- Taking two different ideas, finding associations between them, and coming up with solutions or ideas from the exercise.

• Visuals -- Looking at pictures that spark unexpected connections for the problem you're weighing.

• Wishing -- Giving yourself license to wish for the impossible can sometimes create viable possibilities.

"Do-It-Yourself" Creativity Generating

There are many ways to jump-start your organization's creativity generator.

Alternative Perceptions -- Snyder recommends these approaches to get a new perspective on the problem you're trying to solve. Among the techniques:

1. Imagine that your problem actually belongs to someone else -- not you.
2. Imagine that you have the opposite problem.
3. Think that it is five years from now, and the problem is solved.
4. Enlist other people, in your imagination, as helpers in solving the problem.

"Brainwriting" -- Get your entire group to contribute their ideas by passing around a sheet of paper and asking each participant to weigh in with another idea.

"Whiteboarding" -- Mattimore suggests writing your issue on a centrally located whiteboard, then counting down 10 or 15 days for contributions of ideas to the issue. The whiteboard becomes a central location for mini-brainstorming sessions, and is a symbol of your organization's interest in collaborative problem-solving.

Using Creativity Sessions to Cut Costs

Mattimore was asked to facilitate brainstorming sessions at a billion-dollar personal products company.

He conducted 25 all-day sessions with 12 people per session. Yield: $50 million in cost reductions and quality improvements.

Mind-Mapping for Cost-Cutting: Have employees diagram the details of their jobs, then ask a facilitator to help them compare notes and see where savings are hidden.

To get the most impact from cost-cutting sessions, Mattimore recommends that you:

• Assign monetary values to the ideas.
• Encourage people to share the nitty-gritty of their jobs.
• See if you can generalize once you find a detail worth evaluating.
• Ask people to "feel the pain" of their day-to-day work. Wherever they are frustrated about a task they do, there are opportunities to make changes.

Best Practices of Innovative Organizations

Innovative organizations have built into their structures several practices that serve to perpetuate innovation, says Robinson.

He identifies these practices as:

• Celebrating successes
• Inviting "20-20 hindsight"
• Encouraging playfulness and "blue-sky" thinking
• Training for the "competence of creativity"
• Challenging traditional business activities
• Sharing best practices

Increasing Personal Creativity

We all have the gift of creativity. Some of us take out and use this gift more frequently than others.

"When we're in our normal, high-task, divided attention state -- which is, by definition, high stress -- we can only see things the way we normally do. It's like the great line from the Talmud, ‘We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are'," says Snyder.

"The key is to access the part of the mind that dreams at night -- the ‘heart mind' -- versus ‘the brain mind' that you use when you're awake," says Snyder. To relax the mind, Snyder says you need to go into an alpha brain wave state, which is a state of heightened relaxation. In other words, you need to learn to daydream.

Ayan says that if we want to improve our personal creativity, we must increase our creative "C.O.R.E." The acronym stands for:

• C -- Curiosity
• O -- Openness to new ideas and ways of doing things
• R -- Risk-taking ability
• E -- Energy level for carrying through on new ideas

If you want to increase your creativity, you can do so by working on any one of the four pillars. Faster growth is available to people who are willing to work harder in the one or two areas where they feel the most deficient.

"I have seen remarkable progress in people who have chosen to concentrate on their creative C.O.R.E.," says Ayan. "I've also used these techniques personally, and I know they work."

Contributing Experts:

Jordan Ayan

Jordan Ayan is president of Create-It! Inc., an innovation and technology consulting and training company based in the Chicago area. He is also the founder of SubscriberMail, a leading email marketing provider. As a former vice president of a Dun & Bradstreet division, he developed an online product called FastData, making him one of the pioneers on the Information Highway by developing an early online service. Jordan is a contributor to Inc. Technology magazine, and is the author of "Aha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas." His TEC presentations are "Moving through the Technology Maze" and "Marketing Electronically: Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web."

Bryan W. Mattimore

Bryan W. Mattimore is president of the Mattimore Group, a Stamford, Connecticut-based ideation consulting company founded in 1994, and the co-founder of The Growth Engine Company, LLC, whose goal is to apply creative approaches to marketing/business issues to drive top-line revenue growth. A recognized authority on the design and facilitation of ideation sessions for business, Bryan facilitates more than 100 ideation sessions per year. His best-selling book on the how-to's of business innovation and creativity, "99% Inspiration: Tips, Tales & Techniques for Liberating Your Business Creativity," was published in 1994 by AMACOM. Selected as the American Management Association's book of the year, it was also chosen for the Fortune and Newbridge Book clubs. His articles on applied creativity have appeared in such diverse publications as Advertising Age, Reader's Digest, Success, Training & Development, OMNI, The Futurist, and Across The Board Magazine. His TEC presentation is "Managing Einsteins: Building a 'Breakthrough Thinking' Organization."

Carl Robinson

Carl Robinson is managing partner with the consulting firm MICA Management Resources. His firm offers integrated services in employee and managerial selection, organization assessment, and effective human resource utilization. His TEC presentation is entitled, "Building an Innovative Edge with the Six Hats of Thinking," and draws from the work of Dr. Edward de Bono, a prolific author and leading authority on creativity and high performance thinking skills.

Steven Snyder

Steven Snyder is a long-time favorite, international resource because of the practical take-home skills he gives his audience. He is best known for the development of AlphaLearning, the product of more than 30 years of research into accelerated reading and learning techniques, concentration and attention skills, hypnosis, meditation, visualization, brilliance, passion, and the nature of mastery. He is the author of several books including a popular self-development workbook called, "Re-Mind Your Self," and has produced several audio and video programs. His TEC presentation on innovation is called, "Unlocking the Power of 'I': A Seminar on Creativity."

© Copyright 2010, TEC, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Your use of this website constitutes acceptance of the TEC Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.