The Reality Behind Creativity and Innovation

Robin Karol, CEO of the Product development and Management Association (PDMA), looks at the strategies businesses are employing to grow, expand their penetration into the market and assure their economic success.

Businesses are constantly looking for new ways to grow, expand their penetration into the market and assure their economic success. To do so, management must continually and rapidly introduce new products and/or services; often by assigning someone the responsibility of improving their organization’s ability to be more innovative and creative. Many leaders do not know what they are asking their employees to do because they themselves do not have an in-depth understanding of innovation and creativity. In addition, they are not taking on the responsibility of creating an environment that is supportive of innovation or to drive an ‘innovation process’. They are not fully aware of the complexity and interactions that are necessary for such a process.

An innovation process is composed of a discovery phase, a development phase and a commercialization phase (PDMA Body of Knowledge www.pdma.org). Each of these phases contains a number of specific processes, including the New Concept Development (NCD) Process, which is the major component of the discovery phase or ‘fuzzy front end’. In the NCD process, the engine that drives the front end of an innovation proces is made up of the leadership of the organization, which drives the process in order to create something new. The NCD model does not deal directly with the concepts of creativity and innovation. Rather, it deals with the process of identifying an opportunity, clarifying that opportunity and then creating and selecting ideas. Creativity plays a critical role in the NCD process, which is the beginning of the overall innovation process. The innovation process expidites the formation of new products, businesses, processes, services, etc., and creates bottom line growth.

Creativity and innovation are often thought to be the same, but in reality are truly very different. Creativity is seeing something new – having a new concept or idea – while innovation is the implementation of that new concept or idea. Creativity is one component of an innovation process. The Innovation Process can also be viewed as a specific type of problem solving process, which begins with a problem, need or opportunity. It then proceeds through idea generation, the creativity component of the process and implementation, which ultimately yields a result.

The working environment is a strong influencing factor in this process and can have an extremely strong effect. For this reason, most organizations find it easier to generate ideas than to successfully implement them. For example, a working environment that discourages employee risk-taking is always a major barrier to innovation because people are often paralyzed by the fear of failure, which makes trying something new difficult, if not impossible. The work environment is generally controlled by the ‘engine’ described in the NCD process. As a result, leadership must be aware of the impact that they have on innovaiton.

There are two types of thinking: divergent thinking and convergent thinking. The former seeks to build, amplify, decorate and expand a concept. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, seeks to select, judge and compare, in order to implement and deliver a bottom line result.

Fundamentally different questions characterize each style of thinking: ‘What’s good about it?’ and ‘How can it be used?’ characterize divergent thinking, while ‘What’s wrong with it?’ and ‘Why won't it work?’ characterize convergent thinking. These different types of thinking actually utilize different parts of the brain. If one understands how different these two types of thinking are, one can see that if you use them at the wrong time in the process, the process will be disabled. For example, if an idea is given to a group and they immediately converge on that idea as the answer, the real breakthrough solution may never be found. Using convergent thinking at the wrong time can dampen the idea generation process and disable the potential for breakthrough innovative ideas.

Asking ‘What’s wrong with it?’ leads us to compare the new idea or thought with what we already know about that subject, and if the former doesn’t fit with the latter, we label it ‘a bad idea’ (particularly if we did not come up with it ourselves). We have all been in ‘brainstorming’ meetings where someone summons the courage to suggest an approach to solve a problem, only to have it quashed by another individual, who uses a killer phrase such as ‘It won’t work’, ‘The boss won’t go for it,’ or ‘It’s not in the budget.’ These killer phrases are a sure tip-off that someone is thinking convergently.

Often, it is the experts, those individuals with great knowledge, experience and credibility, who are the very first to tell everyone why a new idea will not work. However, it is precisely these experts who have the most to contribute when it comes to innovation! The solution is to have an expert facilitator in the brainstorming session to insure that the overall process is properly adhered to and those ‘killer phrases’ are not used. It is essential that divergent thinking is used when the task is to generate ideas, and convergent thinking used when the task is to select a path forward and begin implementation. Do not contaminate one with the other. A skilled facilitator can keep a group using the correct part of their brains at each phase of the process, and as a result can enable the creation of hundreds or thousands of ideas. These ideas will then be grouped in a way that connects them and then perhaps summarized to do an evaluation.

Once an idea has been selected the next hurdle to be faced is the ability to execute the entire innovation process. Ideally the organization should have a gated (or phased) product development process in place with trained individuals and experts in project management. The gated process enables the project to be planned, scheduled and executed in a timely manner. The key to this success is the organization’s ability to properly use convergent thinking and make decisions to resource and staff the new projects in a way that enables the fastest possible route to market. It is critical that the business empowers a decision body that has the capability, tools and proper facilitation to enable rapid decision-making, rapid experimentation, and rapid deployment of resources. This decision body must have the authority to deploy the resources necessary, the commitment to meet on a timely basis and the knowledge to make informed decisions. These decisions must be made in the context of an overall strategy that has clearly been communicated and with the use of a portfolio process that allows the leaders to understand how the deployment of resources enables the implementation of the strategy.