Unit I

Introduction

Meaning of Creative and Innovative Thinking

Modernized thoughts and ideas require one to adapt to new tools and
techniques of businesses. In order to do the same, one needs to utilize creative
thinking and innovation. Creativity implies thinking in a new manner and offering
something out of the box. The same is done uniquely through innovation.
New inventions and techniques require the use of resourceful imagination and
highly trained personnel who can bring about a massive change in one’s
business. The business could be traditional, but by applying modernized
techniques, one can improve their existing line of products or services, thus
creative innovation is crucial for a business to thrive today.
Importance of Creative and Innovative Thinking
The following points help us understand the importance of modernised thoughts
and processes in any business:
Meeting the ever-changing demands of clients and customers due to various lifestyle changes
Through feedback and research, a business owner can cater to the new and
existing needs of its clients and consumers, which calls for the use of an
imaginative approach. By adopting up to date and advanced processes, one
can offer better services to its clients and expect long term loyalty
Increasing profitability, profit maximisation
When you have the best of services to offer, one can expect maximum retention
of customers. Also, innovative techniques of businesses can help one prevent
unnecessary expenditure. The money which gets saved can be reutilized and
rolled into your existing business to ensure long term profitability. Using
innovative ways can help in reducing the expenses incurred for raw materials, in
turn maximizing profits.
Offering better services to compete with business rivals
New and well-polished services would fascinate your buyer, thus giving the
buyer more choices to go for what is unique in the market. Access to the same
would ensure an increase in the number of buyers, thereby helping you increase
your overall presence in the market.
Improving motivation among existing employees through innovative training sessions
The process of learning involves a change in one’s thoughts and behaviour.
Training your existing employees with new and innovative techniques can lead
to altered behaviour and increased motivation. Learning experiences provided
by employers to an employee would create room for better efficiency and more
productivity, thus strengthening the human assets in one’s firm.
Reduced levels of stress amongst employees, increased morale and highly trained/qualified personnel
By adopting innovative and creative business techniques in one’s organization,
one can ensure that their employees are able to feel less stressed. There would
be less room for boredom, and one can have better, qualified personnel to
perform tasks with high levels of productivity, thus increasing efficiency.

Components of Creativity

These creativity test results are scored keeping in mind a number of

different creativity criteria. The most common (common to all of the
above) criteria are:

1. Flexibility: This captures the ability to cross boundaries and make

remote associations. This is measured by a number of different
categories of ideas generated.

2. Originality: This measures how statistically different or novel the

ideas are compared to a comparison group. This is measured as a
number of novel ideas generated.

3. Fluency: This captures the ability to come up with many diverse ideas
quickly. This is measured by the total number of ideas generated.

4. Elaboration: This measures the amount of detail associated with the

idea. Elaboration has more to do with focussing on each solution/idea
and developing it further.

Convergent thinking is measured by tests like remote associations test

or insight problems. These problems are solved when you apply one of
the methods below:

1. Make a unique association between parts of the problem. This looks

again similar to flexibility or how fluid is your categorisation schema
enabling you to think out of the box and not be limited by typical
categories or associations.

2. Take a novel approach (and not the typical approach) to problem-

solving. To me, this again looks similar to originality.
3. See the problem from a different perspective. To me, this looks like
how quickly you can adopt multiple perspectives – the speed with which
you can take alternate perspectives and is similar to fluency.

Creativity is also defined as coming up with something that is both novel

and useful. At which point I am reminded of a quote by Oscar Wilde: “We
can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." I understand Wilde to mean
that art need not be useful or fulfill the criteria of utility, but is more
measured by whether it fulfils the criterion of aesthetics or beauty. As
long as one considers art as an integral part of creativity, I think we need
to make room for beauty as part of defining what is creative: creativity =
utility + beauty + novelty.

Individual vs organizational creativity

What is individual or organizational creativity? The two are

connected, but are obviously far from the same. Individual
creativity is ideas or innovations by a single individual — an
author writing a book or a process manager thinking of a
new process, for example. Organizational creativity is ideas
or innovations attributed to a group of people that all work
for the same organization. That could be a team developing,
creating and marketing a new product.

So in other words, organizational creativity is a result of

individual creativity — but not all individual creativity is
organizational. The two are similar, but they have their own
strengths and weaknesses.
The Three Main Areas of Difference

Organizations and individuals behave very differently. An

organization must be efficient and predictable, but
individuals can behave any way they like (within reason of
course). This can be problematic when it comes to creativity.

Also, people tend to be risk-averse and shy away from

change. But companies need to be innovative to survive in
the modern market. So these two will often clash and create
organizational idea management that is dead on arrival. This
can lead to stagnation and a soul-crushing corporate culture.
But how can companies counteract this?
According to Professor Gerard Puccio at Buffalo State
College, companies focus on three things: People,
environment and processes.

People Are the Engine of Creativity

Your innovation will never be better than the individuals that

try to move it forward. This is true for both individual and
organizational creativity. This means that companies need
creative people to innovate.
Individuals do think about their work, but people are often
more focused on personal matters than professional ones. A
company does not want to deter this, but it would like more
focus on work-related ideas. This is an interesting
challenge/opportunity for companies. But how can it be
solved?

Encourage Work Related Ideas

Individual creativity is highly dependent on the mood and

efficiency of the individual. They can try to change their
outlook, but this is often difficult for people to do on their
own.
On the other hand, people are easily motivated and
companies can supply this motivation. So organizational
creativity can often maximize its individual creativity with
motivation. This motivation can be financial or simply about
human engagement. This will not work on everyone, but the
company is pooling ideas from many. So results should be
easily measurable.
Also, a company can evaluate and decide whether to move
forward with an idea or not. Sure, some individuals can do
the same, but not everyone is a doer. An innovative company
needs to be creative and cannot let opportunities out of its
grasp. So it can reap all ideas, even those that are proposed
by employees that will not follow them through on their own.

Environment Can Do a Lot

Many companies, such as Google, Pixar and Apple, have

increased their organizational creativity by building better
environments for their employees. If you want to foster
creativity you need a certain physiological and physical
atmosphere. Otherwise, a new idea might be thrown out just
for changing the status quo. Most people fear or dislike
change, and that can put a damper on radical new ideas —
simply because they are new.
Therefore, individual creativity has a huge advantage on
organizational creativity in regards to environment.
Individuals are free to come up with ideas anywhere they
want. Companies, on the other hand, are often limited by the
office. So what can they do? The best solution is a mobile
idea management platform. It allows employees to come up
with ideas and share them at any place and any time. This
frees the company from forced brainstorming sessions and
allows the creativity to become more fluent and natural.

Types of Innovation

The 4 Types of Innovation

First, we need to understand that there are various ways that
innovation can have an impact on products, services, and processes.
Most commonly we differentiate between 4 levels of innovation
depending if they open up new markets or when the technology is
changing.

The 4 different types of innovation are

 Incremental Innovation
 Architectural Innovation
 Disruptive Innovation
 Radical Innovation
1. Incremental Innovation
Existing Technology, Existing Market

One of the most common forms of innovation that we can observe. It

uses existing technologies within an existing market. The goal is to
improve an existing offering by adding new features, changes in the
design, etc.

Example

The best Example for incremental innovation can be seen in the

Smartphone market where the most innovation is only updating the
hardware, improving the design, or adding some additional
features/cameras/sensors, etc.

2. Disruptive Innovation
New Technology, Existing Market

Disruptive innovation is mostly associated with applying new

technologies, processes, or disruptive business models to existing
industries. Sometimes new technologies and business models seem,
especially in the beginning, inferior to the existing solutions but after
some iterations, they surpass the existing models and take over the
market due to efficiency and/or efficacy advantages.

Examples

Amazon used Internet-Technologies to disrupt the existing industry for

book-shops. They had the existing market for books but changed the
way it was sold, delivered and experienced due to the use of disruptive
technologies. Another example was the iPhone, where existing
technologies in the market (Phones with buttons, keypads, etc.) were
replaced with touch-interface-centered devices combined with intuitive
user interfaces.

3. Architectural Innovation
Existing Technology, New Market

Architectural innovation is something we see with tech giants like

Amazon, Google, and many more at the moment. They take their
domain expertise, technology, and skills and apply them to a different
market. This way they can open up new markets and expand their
customer base.

Examples

Especially digital ecosystem orchestrators like Amazon and Alibaba use

this innovation strategy to enter new markets. They use existing
expertise in building apps, platforms, and their existing customer base
to offer new services and products for different markets. A recent
example for this: Amazon recently entered the medical care field.

4. Radical Innovation
New Technology, New Market

Even it is the stereotypical way most people see innovation; it is the

rarest form of them all. Radical innovation involves the creation of
technologies, services, and business models that open up entirely new
markets.

Example

The best example of radical innovation was the invention of the

airplane. This radical new technology opened up a new form of travel,
invented an industry, and a whole new market.

Innovation Process

When it comes to the innovation process, it’s never “one size fits all”.
However, there are some standard steps and stages that typically
apply to the majority of large organisations. Here we’ve outlined a
standard process that you can use as a blueprint for crafting your
own.
Step 1: Idea generation and collection
It all starts with an idea and the best ideas can come from anyone in
your team, at any time. So making sure everyone knows how to
capture and store ideas is essential.

Experience shows that researching and introducing dedicated idea

management software is the simplest and most effective way to
capture great ideas from your team. It provides a central location for
storing ideas and actioning them in a transparent and efficient
manner.
Step 2: Idea review and evaluation
Ideas should be reviewed and evaluated on a regular basis to ensure
that they move quickly and that your ideators receive immediate
feedback. You don’t want people to think that their ideas are going into
a bottomless pit because lack of feedback can demotivate them and
discourage further participation in your innovation programme.
Step 3: Proof-of-concept or a pilot
Ideas that are aligned with your strategic goals and have successfully
passed through the evaluation stage can be further developed. If the
idea creates a big change, it’s beneficial to run a small pilot, build its
MVP or run a proof of concept before rolling it out to the whole
organisation. Think of this stage as a rehearsal and also as a time to
prepare your communication plan about upcoming changes.

The key to a successful pilot stage is simple: feedback, feedback,

feedback! Watch, listen and participate, and don’t just focus on the
positives. This is your chance to significantly limit risk before going
into full production.

However, if the idea is a quick win, it’s better to act fast and simply
jump into the execution and implementation stage as it will keep the
momentum going. During this stage, you’ll want to establish clear,
measurable KPIs for a full rollout, so pay attention to the details.
Step 4: Full rollout and implementation
It’s time to roll the idea out to your whole company. Luckily, you
should be feeling confident after a pilot, and all your stakeholders
should be on board.

Remember to consider how this new idea is going to be integrated into

your existing systems, and get help with producing clear training
guides.
Step 5: Adoption and benefit realisation
When you’ve successfully implemented an idea, don’t forget to
regularly review and check whether this news solution still solves the
initial problem and whether it has been well adopted by the whole
organisation. It’s also really important to keep collecting feedback. So
continue tracking the success of your initiative against its initial KPIs
and make a note of any lessons learned.

How to create and manage innovation processes

using idea management software
Use Pipeline
A fully customisable pipeline is your most valuable asset in managing
your ideas and ensuring you have full visibility about how ideas are
progressing through each stage.
Update Statuses
You can update the status of each idea in your News Feed or directly
in the Pipeline as soon as they progress further. This gives everyone
in your organisation an overview of what’s happening with each idea
and gives ideators confidence that their ideas actually matter.
Provide feedback at every stage
As you move ideas forward, provide feedback. Whether you’re
discarding an idea for now or moving it straight to implementation,
feedback for an idea owner is super important as it closes the
feedback loop and encourages further ideation.