Report 103

Your newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business – delivered to your e-mail box on the first and third Tuesday of every month.

Tuesday, 7 August 2007
Issue 110

Hello and welcome to another issue of Report 103, your fortnightly newsletter on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

As always, if you have news about creativity, imagination, ideas, or innovation please feel free to forward it to me for potential inclusion in Report103. Your comments and feedback are also always welcome.

Information on unsubscribing, archives, reprinting articles, etc can be found at the end of this newsletter.

MORE GUEST WRITERS!

I am delighted that ever more of you are contributing high quality articles to Report 103. Your articles provide readers with a richer view of innovation and creativity than I alone could ever hope to provide. Today's guest writers include my friend Randah Tahar with an article on Creative Problem Solving and Justin Levesque and H. Fred Walker who have granted us permission to reproduce their article on innovation process and quality tools. As always, if you would like to contribute an article to Report 103, please contact me before your write the article (unless you wish to reuse an existing article and have the authority to do so). I am occasionally offered articles which have little to do with creativity and innovation and would feel terrible rejecting an article written especially for Report 103 (but I have done so in the past).

CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING

By Randah Tahar

“Only dead fish swim with the stream”

The holistic approach of looking at creativity was developed by Mel Rhodes in his Four P’s definition.

A study conducted by Dr. Arnold Meadow and Dr. Sidney Parnes noticed that students who had taken semester courses in Creative Problem Solving averaged 94% better in production of good ideas than those without. Good ideas were scored on the basis of those which were potentially useful and relatively unique. The technical reports of these findings have been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Educational Psychology under the title “Evaluation of Training in Creative Problem-Solving”, 1959.

Two Minds, Two Sets of Thinking

There can be found two minds working together to complete a story. The writer’s mind, is one full of wild imaginations and that counts on freewheeling idea generators. The editor’s mind, on the other hand, is the one which handpicks words, meditates on concepts and pulls out extra words and synonyms. These are two distinct functions that work side-by-side to produce the most marvellous of all works.

Alex Osborn made this connection with creative thinking in his breakthrough book “Applied Imagination”. The two distinct creative minds are needed to enhance our applied creativity.

Divergent Thinking is where we generate many ideas and make lists of options. Convergent thinking is when we start to judge our list, choose among ideas and make decisions.

Both thinking modes have some ground rules in order to be most effective.

Those rules are applied throughout the Creative Problem Solving process. For the purpose of this document, I will not go through the process in detail, but I highly encourage you to get familiar with it as it can be applied to many situations whether educational, functional or personal.

The Creative Problem Solving Process

The process is divided into three main stages, illustrated as follows. The Diverging and Converging tools are used throughout the three stages.

Deciding where to begin

If the situation is unclear or vague and you don’t have all the facts or there is no clear direction…
-> Explore the challenge.

If a clearly defined problem already exists, but there is no clear solution, or there is a need to look into more ideas…
-> Generate ideas.

If good ideas must be strengthened and turned into workable solutions, and there is a need to gain acceptance and support, and there is a need to develop and implement a plan …
-> Prepare for action.

About the Author

Randah Taher is a project developer and trainer who worked in Montreal for 7 years before moving to Toronto where she currently resides. She works with learning, non profit organizations, and social enterprises, and is involved in projects concerning youth, education, and community revitalization. She consults and trains groups in creative thinking tools, innovative strategic management, restructuring and program development.

Randah is the founder and coordinator of “My Arabic Story”, a cultural hub with worldwide volunteers, telling folktales stories through storytelling, puppet shows, and other media. (www.myarabicstory.org). She is currently a graduate student at Buffalo State College getting her degree in Masters in Creative studies, while working as a freelancer consultant and trainer, and writes occasionally in “Contagious Creativity” http://contagiouscreativity.wordpress.com.

THE INNOVATION PROCESS AND QUALITY TOOLS

[Note from Jeffrey: This is the introduction to a much longer article which you can download from the web as a PDF document. The full 195kb article is at http://www.jpb.com/creative/process_n_quality.pdf]

Copyright 2007 American Society for Quality (http://www.asq.org)

Originally appeared in *Quality Progress*, July 2007, pages 18-22

By Justin Levesque and H. Fred Walker

As members of the American Society for Quality, we're interested in how we can apply the "toolbox" of the quality professional to new areas at our companies. The traditional toolbox of the quality professional focuses on distinct statistical and problem solving methods for improving existing service or manufacturing processes.

While the role of the quality professional is important for maintaining a competitive advantage in business, the process of innovation (i.e. new product or service realization) actually creates competitive advantage. Because quality professionals traditionally focus on improving existing processes, the goal of this article is to highlight strategies quality professionals can use to contribute to the process of innovation. We have adapted a product and service realization model from the literature, and
highlighted areas for application of "new" quality tools to facilitate the creation of new products and services faster, cheaper, and with higher quality.

Although our original audience was the quality community, anyone in business with a stake in innovation will find the points of the article valuable. In the global economy, innovation through the creation of new products and services is now more important than ever, and if your company can create new products and services faster than its peers, your company is certainly at an advantage!

Read their full article at http://www.jpb.com/creative/process_n_quality.pdf (PDF file: 195kb)

About the Authors:

Justin Levesque is an MBA and MS candidate at the University of Southern Maine. Justin has built and operated a quality control laboratory in the brewing industry; he is currently employed as a Statistician at IDEXX Laboratories, a biotechnology and pharmaceutical company in Westbrook, Maine USA. Justin can be reached at justin.c.levesque@maine.edu.

H. Fred Walker earned a PhD in Industrial Education and Technology from Iowa State University, in addition to holding several certifications from the American Society for Quality. Fred has written many books on Six Sigma methodology; he is currently Chair of the Department of Technology at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, Maine USA.

BEING INNOVATIVE IN A BIG COMPANY

One of the problems that many large organisations face is how to innovate successfully within the confines of a massive, bureaucratic operational structure. In this article, we will focus on research and development innovation.

In theory, large companies with big research budgets and the resources to hire top scientists should have it made when it comes to innovation. In practice, however, small start ups with comparatively tiny budgets often manage to out-innovate the bigger, established competitors.

The culprit behind this discrepancy is the decision making structure in each kind of company. Large companies often have multiple committees which review each new idea before determining whether or not to go further, how much budget to grant the idea and what milestones should be established. Often, each decision is made by a different committee.

Sending proposals through multiple committees is very time consuming. And one person in a bad mood can kill an idea or stall its development by demanding more information. In fact, the latter is a more typical reaction. Many committee members do not want to take responsibility for rejecting an idea for fear of taking the blame should the idea later succeed or a higher-up buy into it. Instead, committee members demand more information as a stalling and reputation preservation tactic.

The result is damaging to innovation in two ways:

1. It takes a long time for good ideas to be approved and receive a budget for further development. Moreover, getting additional approvals and budget upon passing each milestone is also time consuming. A nimble competitor with a similar idea can often get it to market much faster.

2. For the same reason, it takes a long time for bad ideas to be rejected. This wastes time, budget and valuable resources.

The approach a number of large companies are taking to clear up such innovation blockages involves two steps:

1. Decentralise research and innovation into smaller units with fast track approval and rejection processes. This ensures good research ideas get developed quickly and bad research ideas fail quickly. And, of course it is important that failure is perceived as a learning process rather than a failure on the part of the researchers developing a failed idea.

2. Develop methods to facilitate buying in ideas developed outside the company, a process that has come to be known as open innovation. This takes advantage of the fact that even companies which decentralise their research and development innovation cannot always out-think their smaller, nimbler competitors. Those small companies, however, do not have the marketing might of the big-boys. Thus, large companies buying small company's innovations – or sometimes buying the entire small company – can often be a win-win scenario for both firms.

One company that his taken this approach is GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical firm. This is a much needed strategic improvement in view of the problems facing the pharma industry these days: several expensive recalls, demands for low-cost drugs in developing countries and complex drug approval processes.

GlaxoSmithKline recognised that their innovation process was highly bureaucratic and that this cost them many good ideas. Likewise, they saw that many poor ideas were taken too seriously for too long.

As a result, they did away with the company's top-down reseach approach and established a number of autonomous “Centres of Excellence in Drug Discovery”, each with the wherewithal to decide which drugs to develop further and which to drop. These centres are relatively new, but initial results are encouraging.

Secondly, GlaxoSmithKline has changed its innovation rewards system. Managers are rewarded equally for successful inventions regardless of whether those inventions were developed in house or acquired from outside. This is a clever move. Most firms reward ideas and inventions that are developed in house. Thus managers have little motivation to buy in inventions from outside, even when buying in those inventions would be more cost effective than developing a similar product in-house.

Numerous other large companies - IBM and W.L. Gore & Associates come immediately to mind - have also succeeded by adopting relatively small autonomous business units to devise and develop new research and development ideas. In IBM's case, this was adopted to save the company in the early 90s when the computer market changed radically. In Gore's case, this is how the company has always operated.

So, if I may steal an ancient Volkswagen advertising slogan, when it comes to innovation in big firms, the best thing you can do is to “think small”.

NO HIDDEN JENNI ADVERTISEMENT IN THIS ISSUE OF REPORT 103
- Just this Blatant Message!

If you are a regular reader of Report 103, you will be used to my hiding references to Jenni idea management software service in at least one article of each issue. Of course we try to make Report 103 an informative eJournal, rather than a typical corporate newsletter with dull stories about our products and high pressure tactics to encourage you to buy those products.

Nevertheless, this newsletter is funded by Bwiti bvba /jpb.com whose primary income comes from sales of Jenni. Hence the hidden commercials. However, in proofreading this issue of Report 103, I realise we've not hidden any marketing messages whatsoever.

Sales and marketing people won't be happy. So here's a less than subtle message: Jenni idea management software service is a simple to use, comprehensive software + service designed to help you solicit ideas from employees, capture ideas and review those ideas to determine which are most likely to be winners.

Jenni is not a software. Rather it is a complete service which includes our advice whenever you want it. Moreover, this is included in our standard package which is provided on a low-cost, zero risk subscription basis. There are no huge up-front fees, no implementation fees (except for short term contracts or customisations) and you can cancel your contract at any time and for any reason with just 30 days notice.

As a result, you pay as you innovate. Most other systems require you to pay before you innovate and offer little recourse if you cannot innovate with their products.

As a result, with Jenni you have little to lose and a great many innovative ideas to gain. Find out more from http://www.jpb.com/jenni/.

FACEBOOK AND COMMUNICATION

My more geek-oriented friends have introduced me to FaceBook (www.facebook.com) and I must admit I find it addictive. Moreover, I am not bombarded with unwanted business solicitations as I have been on business-oriented networking sites. If you are also using FaceBook and would like to network with me, please do. I am the only Jeffrey Baumgartner in Belgium (it's amazing how many Jeffrey Baumgartner's there are in the world!). And if we've not corresponded before, please mention Report 103.

Of course you don't need to be on Facebook to network with me or talk innovation. I always welcome your thoughts on creativity and innovation and relish the opportunity to share ideas. A number of terrific friendships have developed from people who shared their innovation and creativity thoughts with me after reading Report 103.

LATEST IN BUSINESS INNOVATION

If you want to keep up with the latest news in business innovation, I recommend Chuck Frey's INNOVATIONweek (http://www.innovationtools.com/News/subscribe.asp). It's the only e-newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on all of the latest innovation news, research, trends, case histories of leading companies and more. And it's the perfect complement to Report 103!

Happy thinking!

Jeffrey Baumgartner

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Report 103 is a complimentary weekly electronic newsletter from Bwiti bvba of Belgium (a jpb.com company: http://www.jpb.com). Archives and subscription information can be found at http://www.jpb.com/report103/

Report 103 is edited by Jeffrey Baumgartner and is published on the first and third Tuesday of every month.

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