Unleashing Creativity

What is often times the largest barrier to starting one’s business, launching one’s own product/offering, or creating and launching a marketing campign from scratch?

Coming up with the idea itself

need

discrepancy between current state and desired state.

The idea generation and idea evaluation phases are known as

Diverge & Converge

Diverge

Generate as many ideas as possible - Left side of D&G diagram

Converge

What we do when when we choose ideas. Make choices.

Idea Generation Packaging/Bundling/Delivery Method example

Aluminum Budweiser bottle - one of the largest, most important innovations of the company in the early 2000s. You can’t have glass at sporting events and people wanted bottles, not cans. Resulted in huge profits for Budweiser.

Idea Generation Features example

Pay as You Go, Subscribe.

Idea Generation Business Model examples

-Commuters buying milkshake 1st thing in the morning. Morning milkshake: lasts through the whole commute.

-Screen time tracker in response to health and new trends.

Finding about brainstorming in groups?

Brainstorming in a group, in an unstructured way, is generally counterproductive.

Why is brainstorming in a group, in an unstructured way, generally counterproductive?

1) Social loafing: less effort exerted by individuals due to individual contributions being less identifiable or accountable.

2) Fear of evaluation

3) Production Blocking - there is limited airtime thus less creative ideas

When brainstorming in a group what’s a way to level things out on the playing field?

Share an embarrassing story!

Preferred solution to brainstorming in groups

Brain writing - sit, each person has a sheet of paper. Write and when time ends youhave someone else’s sheet of paper.

Cognitive entrenchment

The tendency for our existing knowledge, habits, and well-learned ways of using objects or ideas to lock us into familiar interpretations, making it harder to see alternative solutions. Expertise and prior experience can sometimes hurt creative problem-solving because they narrow how we frame a problem.

Cognitive entrenchment Dunker Experiment

Given a candle, a box of tacks, and matches participants are asked to attach the candle to a wall in such a way that it wouldn’t drip wax onto the table when burning. The box with tacks is more than simply a box with tacks, it’s a platform and wax catcher, something that can only be seen when cognitive entrenchment is broken.

Strategies to break out of cognitive entrenchment

-Lower the standards

-Don’t benchmark

-Use analogies

-Provide constraints

-Persistence

-Be depleted

-Take a walk

-Switch to something else

How did Brucks and Huang demonstrate that trying to be creative backfires?

People separated into two groups: 1) generate as many ideas as possible 2) generate creative ideas.

Group 1 generated more ideas as the creative group was pressured by self monitoring of wether their ideas were creative enough, resulting in a delayed sharing of ideas and discarding “boring” ideas prematurely. Cognitive entrenchment also kicked in. Thus, quantity leads to quality, meaning that more ideas increase the chance of a creative idea.

What is an effect of benchmarking

Unconscious plagiarism as seen by the wheelchair example.

“It doesn’t have to be a wheelchair” → ideas were chair related.

No example → ideas weren’t dominated by chairs.

How can analogies be used to enhance creativity

Not looking for examples in one’s domain, rather outside the domain. Use analogies for idea generation of as many different types of products that this new product or its components could look like or work like. Analogies help encourage remote associations.

Example of constrains being effective promoters of creative

Two groups were told to generate toys for children

G1: Had all different shapes of blocks available

G2: Had just 5 blocks

G2 resulted in more creative products

Lucas and Nordgreen study demostrates

You should always put more time into idea generation than you’ll think you need.

Be depleted

We are most creative when we are a little bit depleted

Take a Walk

Walking makes you more creative

Switch to something else

Intentionally switching tasks frequently boosts creativity, preventing “cognitive fixation” and leading to more diverse and unique ideas.

Conclusion on creativity

Creativity is hard because our brains are efficiently organized, but there are lots of ways to break this entrenchment.

Ideation Templates

-Structured/systematic approach to idea generation

-Identify patterns in past successful innovations

-Reproduce these successful patterns when searching for innovation opportunities/ideas

-Applied to new product/service ideation and advertising

-Product focused, not customer focused → function follows form.

Five Ideation Templates

1. Subtraction: Useful for complex products or to control costs

2. Task unification: When aiming to control costs

3. Division: For simple quantitative improvements

4. Multiplication: For simple quantitative improvements

5. Attribute dependency: Useful generally, but hard.

Subtraction Template

Take something elemental away from a product and build with a new name.

Example of Subtraction Template (Facebook Minus -)

Instagram: share photos

X: Restricts what one can write

Snapchat: Photos disappear

TikTok: Lip-sync videos

Pitch Black Restaurants

Example of the subtraction template. A restaurant without light

All Star and Nike no shoelace models

Example of the subtraction template. Shoes without laces.

Uniqlo shirt with no logo

Example of the subtraction template. A shirt without branding.

Ipod Shuffle Subtraction Template

Missing the screen and the ability to pick your own song.

What’s the essence of the subtraction template?

Removing an essential component

Subtraction template instructions

1. Write down the product’s internal components (i.e., components within the manufacturer’s control)

2. Identify each component’s function in the product

3. Remove (or reduce) a component

4. Visualize the resulting product

5. Search for any consumer needs that match the new product

Task Unification Template

Assigning a new task to an existing resource.

Examples of task unification template

Eggs cooking in the shovels, captcha numbers from a map picture, toothbrush with toothpaste inside, toilet with hand sink , durflame firelogs, listerine pocketpack, offline glass that uses phone as a glass holder, soccer ball that produces energy, Reef sandals with a compartment

Task Unification Template Instructions

1. Write down the product’s internal components (i.e. components within the manufacturer’s control)

2. Identify each component’s function in the product

3. Write down the product’s external components (i.e. components of the product’s environment / packaging

4. Could one of the functions currently fulfilled by an internal component be “transferred” to an external component? Can we remove the now obsolete internal component?

5. Could one of the functions currently fulfilled by an external component be “transferred” to an internal component?

6. What new, desirable functions could be fulfilled by the external components?