Managing Creativity and Innovation:
Making It Tangible And Useable

 

 

I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled "Is creativity management an oxymoron?"

The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of "creativity management" was the word "management." Replace it with the word "optimization" and the resistance disappears; all we're really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process.

Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they're likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output.

Then you can begin discussing how to improve the enormous amount of creative output people generate, from problem solving in everyday business life right up to the level or art.

 

 

 

 
Creativity and Innovation are often taught using airy-fairy, intangible, ungrounded, unscientific, non-useable, undefined, mysterious terminology and theories. To get a handle on it you need to talk in real, tangible, useable, measurable concepts to explore the twelve major themes that are common in all fields of creativity:
   
 
  • What are the critical differences between creativity and innovation? Are different competencies required?
  • Do "creative people" have common characteristics and, if so, what are they? Are they stable across situations?
  • Can creativity be learned and developed or is it a special gift? Why is it that some people just are more creative?
  • Why is motivation more important than nature or nurture? How can it be enhanced, measured and managed?
  • Blocks and unlocking. Organisational culture. We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? What properties of an organisational culture cultivate productivity?
  • What properties of an organisational structure foster creativity and innovation? Organisational structure results from a number of factors and modifying it is often not desireable, so how do we get around this?
  • What is the most effective team structure?
  • What is the role of knowledge? How do we effectively collaborate and use networks to frame-break and reduce path dependency? How do we tap into tacit knowledge? Does mastering all the literature foster creativity and innovation or does over-specialisation cause blinkered vision?
  • What are the differences between radical and incremental creativity and the consequences for structures, processes, skills and resources? Is it wiser to target radical or incremental ideas?
  • Is there value in structure and goals or is "do your best" more effective?
  • Is there a process that makes insight, eureka, the aha! experience more likely? Does this process allow us to produce a stream of consistently good ideas?
  • How do we value an idea, so as to decide how to invest resources? How do we risk manage the innovation process?

This 130+ page document is invaluable for a) the creativity and innovation consultant, leader, director or manager and b) the creative person, idea generator or innovator wishing to produce or improve tangible creative output.

As the concepts are universal, this document applies to a variety of domains and industries, including human capital management, product development, organisational culture and structure management, management consultancy, intrapraneur and entrepreneur, think tanks, creative corporate strategy, business creativity etc.

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Powerpoint Presentation




A ready to go powerpoint presentation (with detailed notes) that is a companion to the Fundamental Core Concepts. Ideal for consultants, coaches, workshops, training, and management presentations.

a) Fully editable.

b) Contains 50 slides, 300+ bullet points.

c) Divided into 4 sections : Contents, Theory, Data and Conclusions, Summary

d) 59 pages of detailed notes

e) Clearly identifiable set of notes for each set of slides

f) Clearly identifiable notes for each bullet point within a slide

g) Multiple academic and real life examples to form powerful arguments

h) For and against theories for each argument

i) Instantly apply your own design template (powerpoint function)

j) Covers all the topics discussed on this web site.

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Creativity and Innovation DIY Audit

 

A ready to go creativity and innovation quantitative sheets for DIY audits. Ideal for coaches, consultants, leaders and managers.

a) Simply rate each process or practice on a scale of 0 to 10. Includes more than 150 practices and processes that sharpen your management of creativity and innovation.

b) Divided into sections (organisational culture, structure, group structure, learning and development, motivation, knowledge management, radical versus incremental creativity, process, idea valuation and more). Ensure you are taking holisitic action.

c) Find your zero ratings - processes or practices you are not considering or incorporating at all.

d) Find strengths and weaknesses and target weaknesses for improvement. Compare and contrast strengths with weaknesses. Identify obstacles.

e) Find contradictions. For example, respondents often provide a high value when asked if they intensely investigate a problem. But then answer low when queried about problem investigation practices.

f) Focus leader behaviour. Do your managers know what they should be doing?

g) Consistently rate yourself to monitor improvements.

h) Ask others to rate you - staff, colleagues and clients - find discrepancies between how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you.

i) Create an action plan to guide positive change.

j) Benchmark exisiting practices, processes, attitudes and beliefs with focused one-on-one interviews.

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Good Idea Generator
More than 300 techniques to help you generate a substantial pool of good ideas and help you problem solve...


All creativity and problem solving workshops use a variety of techniques to do essentially four things: a) unblock the mind, b) tap into tacit knowledge, c) trigger the mind into working at various cognitive levels and d) apply a) and b) and c) to the areas of problem identification and idea generation. Individuals and groups are given a set of mental and physical tasks or exercises designed to elicit ideas. Creativity and problem solving workshops can be useful: working in groups can produce a lot of laughter, the coordinator can help reduce the negative elements of group dynamics and personal psychology that hinder creativity but, most importantly, the coordinator forces you to think of ideas (extract tacit knowledge, form relationships) using various exercises. However, you can't attend a workshop everytime you need an idea, so this software contains more than 300 of those exercises, which can be performed alone on a single computer or in a group over a network.

Each exercise requires only five ideas. Each exercise requires you to look at the problem or the solution in a different way. Each exercise is chosen randomly. Thus, only by performing five exercises, it is possible to quickly produce 25 ideas. By persisting through 50, 100, 200, 300 exercises, it is possible to generate a substantial idea pool.

Research has revealed that by requiring five, short ideas and performing many, different exercises the mind is forced to frame-break and reduce path dependency; multiple areas of the subconscious are accessed to a significant depth in short bursts; the mind is tasked and stimulated at various cognitive levels; energy is conserved (intensely thinking of ideas can be tiring work). As it can be said with great confidence that simply being prolific produces good ideas, by completing 20, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300 or more exercises, you will greatly increase the chance of producing a quantity of quality ideas. Further, the more exercises you perform, the more unblocked and confident you become and the more fun and radical will be your ideas. The randomness of the exercises means that you can start again without fear of repetition.

More than 300 well known and original exercises are included, such as REVERSAL, ATTRIBUTES, SCAMPI, ENHANCEMENT, REDUCTION, RANDOM INPUT, ASSIMILATION, various ASSERTION techniques, various UNBLOCKING techniques, PROVOCATION, REFRAMING, various MATRICES, HOWTO combinations, OVERSIZE, UNDERSIZE, GENIUS, FEEL ME, DISTORTION, MUD-SLINGING, TWO-WORDS, METAPHOR, AERIAL, SWOT, SECOND BEST, SHOUT, CONCEPT FAN, STORYTELLING and STORY FORMING scenarios and much more.

The variety of exercises means that any form of problem can be addressed or any type of idea can be generated - from thinking of a new brand name to saving your marriage to developing a character for a film script to coming up with new products to finding something original to say at your next business presentation. Even complex problems that require new knowledge and have practical impediments can be solved, usually by incrementally toying with various ideas until radical leaps are made. Apply these techniques to any problem at your convenience and never be stuck for a good idea again.

This release contains 372 creativity + 117 creative writing exercises.

Works on all Windows operating systems above 95; runs on a Mac with the appropriate Emulator.

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© All Rights Reserved kal [AT] managing-creativity.com
4a Westwick Gardens, London, W14 0BU

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.screenplay-structure.com/ ; http://www.story-structure.org/ ; http://www.heros-journey.info/ ; http://www.monomyth.info/ ; http://www.sqaji.com/ ; Hero's Journey Star Wars ; Hero's Journey Joseph Campbell ; Hero with a Thousand Faces ; Hero's Journey Literature ; Hero's Journey Campbell ; Hero's Journey Odyssey ; Old ; Old2