DBA 403:

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
24th February 2022
DBA 403:ENTREPRENEURSHIP
SESSION THREE

CREATIVITY, IDEATION
AND INNOVATION
 Session Objectives
• At the end of the session, students should be able
to understand:
vThe Meaning and Distinction of Creativity,
Ideation and Innovation
vThe Creativity Process
vBlockages and Methods of enhancing Creativity
vMeaning and process of ideation
vTypes of innovation
vDiffusion of innovation
CREATIVITY
Creativity, Innovation, and
Entrepreneurship
Creativity is the ability to develop new ideas an to
discover new ways of looking at problems and
opportunities.

Innovation is the ability to apply creative solutions to

problems and opportunities to enhance or to enrich
people’s lives. (Creative destruction)

In a nutshell, creativity is thinking new things,

innovation is doing new things.

CREATIVITY IDEATION INNOVATION

CREATIVITY
§ Create: An abstract and general process that
bring forth that which never existed.
§ Synonyms for create: conceive, discover, design,
father, imagine, initiate, invent set up, produce,
etc.
§ Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process
involving the generation of new ideas or concepts,
or new associations between existing ideas or
concepts.
§ It involves curiosity and observation
§ It results in improved efficiency or effectiveness
 Encouraging Creativity: The
Confluence Approach
Practical
Intelligence

Analytical Successful Success as an

Intelligence Intelligence Entrepreneur

Creative Adapted from Baron & Shane, 2005

Intelligence
 Research has shown that….
• In Sierwald’s (1989) longitudinal study, students with
high creativity in addition to intelligence surpassed
those merely high on intelligence at all levels of
school.
• Facaoaru (1985) showed that gifted engineers
displayed not only high ability in knowing,
recognizing, recalling and reapplying, but also in
seeing possibilities, discovering problems, branching
out, or inventing.
• It is not enough to be intelligent so as to be successful
but you also need to be creative (Croppley & Urban,
2000).
 Creative Thinking
• The right brain is
creative and intuitive
– lateral thinking
• The left brain is
logical and rational –
vertical thinking
• Those who use their
right brain are more
likely to be different
and challenge
traditional mindsets
(paradigms), which
• The brain leads to innovation
(also known as
– 2 % of body mass “creative
– Consumers 20% of energy destruction”)
 Cognitive Models of Creativity
§ Wallas’ (1926) - 4 main stages: preparation, incubation,
illumination, and verification.
§ Parnes, Noller, and Biondi (1977) - 5 step Creative Problem
Solving (CPS) Process: fact finding; problem finding (defining);
idea finding; solution finding; and acceptance finding.
§ Amabile (1988) also identified 5 stages: presentation;
preparation; generation; validation; and assessment.
§ Cropley & Urban, 2000 – identified Mess finding; Data
finding; Problem finding; Idea finding; Solution finding;
Acceptance finding
§ Holt 2002, identifies 5 basic stages in the creative process; idea
germination (recognition), preparation (rationalisation),
incubation, illumination, verification
Creative Process
1. Idea germination (recognition):
§ The seeding stage
§ Characterized by interest in or curiosity about some specific
problem or area of study
§ Experience of doubt or uneasiness and wonder about
something
2. Preparation (rationalization)
§ Conscious search for knowledge/information about the idea
§ Seeking information about possible solutions
§ Prepare the mind for creative thinking (formal education,
work experience, etc)
§ Develop a solid understanding of the problem or decision
3. Incubation (fantasizing)
§ Allowing the rational idea to incubate in the subconscious
mind to find resolution
§ Subconscious assimilation of the information into own
system.
§ Assimilation into own system
§ Transformation - View the similarities and differences in the
information collected
4. Illumination (realization)
§ Recognition of the idea as a feasible one
§ Occurs when the idea resurfaces as a realistic creation
§ Give the subconscious time to reflect on the information
(daydream, relax, etc)
§ The creation of an innovative idea – the “Eureka factor” stage
5. Verification
§ Application or test to prove that the idea has value
§ The development stage of refining knowledge into
application
§ Many ideas will fall by wayside when verified
§ Validate the idea is accurate and useful (conduct experiments,
prototypes, etc)
6. Implementation
§ Transform the idea into reality
§ Outcome is opportunities
Convergent thinking is the ability to see the similarities
and connections among various data and events.

Divergent thinking is the ability to see differences among

various data and events.
Creativity Potential is affected by
• Increase with Age
• Levels of Education
• Usage (or Lack of Use)
• Extensive Bureaucratic Systems
• Latent Creativity Potential is also affected by
üPerpetual
üCultural/Environmental
üEmotional
üIntellectual Abilities
 Creativity Blocks
• Stereotypes: seeing what is • Fear of mistakes
familiar • Inability to tolerate
• Isolating the problem ambiguity
• Delimiting the problem too • Premature judgment
closely • Inability to incubate
• Inability to have multiple • Change as a problem or an
views of the problem addiction
• Saturation • Relation between fantasy
and reality

Perceptual Emotional

Cultural/Environmental Intellectual/Expressive
• Taboos (language usage, people • Language (visual, rhetoric,
interaction…) formal…)
• Fantasy and reflections as marginal poor- • Language as responsible for the
valued activities wiring of your brain
• Children can play, adults cannot• • Language and it expressive
boundaries
• Social pressure (remember your high
school times?) • Catastrophic: “The exact
formulation is the only way to
• Tradition is good (change is evil) go”
• Capitalism (money can fix anything)
Barriers to Creativity
Searching for the one “right” answer
Most educational systems teach that there is one “right”
answer to a problem. This is a boon to creativity since it acts
as a block to brainstorming.
Focusing on “being logical”
Being logical is valuable when evaluating ideas and
implementing them, however, focusing too much effort on
being logical in the early imaginative phases discourages the
use of intuition.
Blindly following the rules
Often times, creativity depends on our ability to break existing
rules so we can find new ways of doing things.
Constantly being practical
Suspending practicality for a while frees the mind to consider
creative solutions that, otherwise, might never arise.
Barriers to Creativity (cont…)
Viewing play as frivolous
Play gives us the opportunity to reinvent reality and to
reformulate established ways of doing things.

Becoming overly specialized

Defining a problem as one area of specialty limits the ability
to see how it might be related to other issues.

Avoiding ambiguity
Ambiguity encourages us to “think something different.”
Ambiguous situations force us to stretch our minds beyond
their normal boundaries and to consider creative options we
might otherwise ignore.
Barriers to Creativity (cont…)
Fearing looking foolish
Creative thinking is no place for conformity. New ideas are
rarely born in a conforming environment. People tend toward
conformity to avoid looking foolish.

Fearing mistakes and failure

Trying something new often leads to failure, however, failure
should not be seen as an end; but rather as pit stops toward
success.

Believing that “I’m not creative”

One who believes they are not creative will likely behave in the
same way, thus making the belief a reality. Everyone has the
potential to be creative, however, one must tap into that
potential first.
 Nurturing Creativity
• Appropriate Thinking Skills and Strategies – In our case,
thinking is regarded as a process that uses existing information
to produce further information. In the case of creativity, this
further information contains effective novelty. This involves
analyzing the particular form of the problem, selecting from
among the masses of information available at any moment,
relating new information to what is already known, combining
elements of new and old information, evaluating newly
emerging combinations, selectively retaining successful
combinations, and communicating the results to others.
• General and Specific Knowledge - This serves as a source of
ideas, and is therefore favorable to the production of novelty.
Thus, linking learning outside the classroom with school
learning enhances the chances of creativity
 Nurturing Creativity (ctd)
• Creativity Facilitating Personality Factors – Could include
list autonomy, nonconformity, openness to stimuli, flexibility,
tolerance of ambiguity, inner directedness, and ego strength,
among others. However, other studies have shown that there is
no unitary personality profile that is both typical of highly
creative people as a group and also distinguishes them from
the less creative.
• Motivation for Creativity – the motivation may be intrinsic
or externally motivated say be the lure of rewards. Creation of
novelty requires readiness to diverge, defy conventional
opinion, or expose oneself to the possibility of being wrong ie
taking risks
 Nurturing Creativity (ctd)
• Supportive Environment- A product must be communicated
to other people and at least tolerated by them (“sociocultural
validation”) if it is to be acclaimed as creative. Creativity
requires; acceptance of differentness, openness and tolerance
of variability, renunciation of rigid sanctions against
(harmless) mistakes, provision of a “creativogenic” climate.
• Creativity Fostering Teacher Behavior- These provide a
model of creative behavior, reinforce such behavior when
pupils display it, protect creative pupils from conformity
pressure, and establish a classroom climate that permits
alternative solutions, tolerates constructive errors, encourages
effective surprise, and does not isolate nonconformers.
 Techniques for Improving the
Creative Process
Brainstorming is a process in which a small group of people interact
with very little structure with the goal of producing a large quantity of
novel and imaginative ideas.

Mind-mapping is a graphical technique that encourages thinking on

both sides of the brain, visually displays the various relationships
among ideas, and improves the ability to view a problem from many
sides. This is often referred to as “flip-flopping.”

Out of the Box Thinking. Robert Alan Black, Ph.D. believes that
there are more thinking systems than simply out-of-box and in-the-box
thinking. Includes Out-of-Box, In-the-Box, New-Box, Other-Box, No-
Box Thinking
Reference http://www.creativityforlife.com/article1051.html
 Some Methods of Improving Creativity
Brain Spontaneous participation. No Criticism is allowed
Storming Quantity of Ideas is desired; Combinations and improvements is
encouraged

Reverse Spontaneous participation only that criticism is allowed

Brain Focuses on the negative aspects of an idea and how to resolve the problem
Storming
Gordon Developing new ideas when the individuals are unaware of the problem
Method Thereafter, the actual problem is revealed allowing a refinement of the
final solution

Checklist Developing new ideas through a general list of related issues

Method
There is flexibility in length and form of checklist

Attribute Developing a new idea by looking at the positives and negatives

Listing
Method
 Other Methods of Improving Creativity
Big Dream Developing a new idea by thinking without constraints
Approach

Collective Developing New ideas by group members regularly interacting and

Notebook recording new ideas
Method
Forced Look at the relationships. Firstly isolate the elements of the problem;
Relationships Establish the relationships between the various components; Record
and Analyse the resultant relationships; develop new relationships

Free Developing new ideas through a chain of word associations

Association

Parameter Developing a new idea by identifying the various parameters,

Analysis examining the underlying issues and finally developing solutions
How to Enhance Creativity
Expecting creativity
One of the best ways to communicate the expectation of
creativity is to give employees permission to be creative.
Expecting and tolerating failure
Creative ideas will produce failures as well as successes.
Creativity requires taking chances, and managers must remove
employees’ fear of failure.
Encouraging curiosity
Constantly asking “what if…” questions and taking a “maybe
we could…” attitude allows one to break out of the
assumptions that limit creativity.
Viewing problems as challenges
Every problem offers the opportunity for innovation. Dumping
one’s problems on employees’ desks to be “fixed” does nothing
to develop creativity within employees.
How to Enhance Creativity (cont…)
Providing creativity training
“What separates the average person form Edison, Picasso, or
even Shakespeare isn’t creative capacity – it’s the ability to tap
that capacity by encouraging creative impulses and then acting
upon them.” Training can help everyone learn to tap their
creative capacity.
Providing support
One must give employees the tools and resources they need to
be creative. One of the most valuable resources is time.
Rewarding creativity
Monetary rewards, praise, recognition, and celebration can be
powerful incentives.
Modeling creative behavior
Entrepreneurs who set examples of creative behavior, taking
chances, and challenging the status quo will soon find their
employees doing the same.
 Criteria for Functional Creativity
(Cropley & Cropely, 2005)
• Effectiveness
“A bridge must take people across the river”
• Elegance
“Provoke, a “Why didn’t I think of that?” reaction”
• Generalizability
“Applicable in other apparently unrelated situations”
• Germinality / Seminality
“open up new approaches to problems / demonstrate the existence of
previously unnoticed problems”
These characteristics exist in a hierachy
 Not All that glitters is gold...
• The dark side of Creativity;
üCybercrime
üForeign Country manipulation of
other countries’ affairs
üOnline Academic fraud eg
üGrey regulatory frameworks
• Counter Actions
üSecurity enhancements processes
üAdditional verification measures
üShift towards encrypted ledgers
üEnhanced awareness and remedial
actions
IDEATION
 IDEA GENERATION
• An idea is an output of creativity
• An “idea” is not an “opportunity”
• An opportunity has the qualities of being attractive,
durable and timely and is anchored in a product or
service which creates or adds value for its buyer or
end user
• Methods of generating ideas include;-
– Focus Groups
– Brain Storming
– Brain Writing
– Problem Inventory Analysis
 SOURCES OF BUSINESS IDEAS
• Recognizing needs – use the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
framework
• Recognizing trends e.g. demographic, knowledge trends, climate
trends etc.
• Varied and widely traveled background
• Knowledge transfers across fields
• Borrow ideas and import to own situation
• Convert hobby into a business
• Analyze linkages to existing businesses
• Analyze events for possible opportunities
• Profiting from waste
• Revisiting projects/businesses that have failed
• Adding a service to existing products, etc.
MASLOW’S HIERACHY OF NEEDS
 Recognizing Fads
• A short lived business opportunity which makes
people wildly excited for a little while
• A fad can be a gold mine as long as you plant for a
short business cycle to get in and get out
• It is prudent to plan for a quick payback period
during the introductory stage
• Very common in fashion clothing
• Some fads turn into long lasting good volume
businesses
INNOVATION
 INNOVATION
• Synthesized definition:
– Innovation is the creative regeneration and application
of new ideas that can achieve significant improvements
in a product, activity, structure, program or policy
• Innovation is therefore transformation of creative
ideas into useful applications. Creativity is then a
prerequisite to innovation
• Innovation = Creativity + commercialization
• Components
– Subject of innovation – May include product, service, activity,
structure, program, policy etc.
– New ideas & its application – put to work, exploited, practically
implemented
– Change – not just minor change, but rather something important
and which has an impact on value
 Reality…
“All experienced physicians have seen “miracle cures.”
Patients suffering from terminal illnesses recover
suddenly—sometimes spontaneously, sometimes by going
to faith healers, by switching to some absurd diet, or by
sleeping during the day and being up and about all night.
Only a bigot denies that such cures happen and dismisses
them as “unscientific.” They are real enough. Yet no
physician is going to put miracle cures into a textbook or
into a course to be taught to medical students. They cannot
be replicated, cannot be taught, cannot be learned. They
are also extremely rare; the overwhelming majority of
terminal cases do die, after all…” Peter Drucker, 1984.
Categories of Innovation
Exploitative Innovation
• Developed on the basis of previously
successful innovation
• May not require a big research and
development budget
• Often an extension of existing innovation

Exploratory
Radical Innovation
Innovation • Developed from
• Also known as inception with often
no idea on what the
disruptive
outcome will be
innovation
• Changes existing • Expensive as often
models of behaviour requires a research
and development
budget

Incremental Innovation
• Developed over previous innovation and
evolves gradually
 How purposeful innovation starts..
• Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the
opportunities. It begins with thinking through the sources of innovative
opportunities
• Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. The second imperative of
innovation is therefore to go out to look, to ask, to listen. Successful
innovators use both the right side and the left side of their brains.
• An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused.
It should do only one thing, otherwise, it confuses. If it is not simple, it
won’t work. Everything new runs into trouble; if complicated, it cannot
be repaired or fixed.
• Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do
one specific things.
• A successful innovation aims at leadership. Although leadership is not
warranted, if an innovation does not aim at leadership from the
beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely
to be capable of establishing itself.
 Diffusion of Innovation
Innovation with
Value

Self Reflection
§Knowledge/A
wareness
§Interest Social Self Communication
§Evaluation System Reflection Channel

§Trial
§Decision/
Adoption
§Confirmation
Time to allow
diffusion
Source: Rogers, 1962
END