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Do You Know Too Much To Be Creative?
by Jon Hall
12.10
The ongoing economic downturn has intensified the need for breakthrough thinking. When money is tight, consumers tend to "default" to tried and true products they are familiar with. For companies to grow in this environment, it’s essential to provide compelling new benefits that will get consumers to take notice and take action. The challenge is to go beyond incremental thinking, where "new" products are simply variations on a theme (e.g., better, faster, easier, longer-lasting, etc.), and instead to create truly discontinuous offerings.
Working in the fields of consumer understanding and innovation for over 25 years, we’ve found one of the biggest inhibitors of breakthrough thinking is the institutional knowledge teams develop over time. This "conventional wisdom" frames the team’s view of their business, their consumer, and their technology capabilities to the point of constraining their vision of how dynamically different their products and services could be. Simply put, the more you know, the harder it is to innovate.
"Open Innovation" or "crowd sourcing" is an emerging way to get fresh thinking on an idea. In many cases, a challenge or assignment is posted on an idea exchange website, and virtually anyone is free to create ideas. While the fresh perspective is helpful, there is a need for more definition, more clearly grounded understanding of the specific business/consumer, and a more focused collaboration in order to effectively generate actionable, breakthrough ideas. Confidentiality is also a significant concern given the open forum.
In order to springboard over this creativity gap, we launched Transforum™, an online idea generation forum that combines the brainstorming power of iconoclastic thinkers with the knowledge and expertise of client teams. Transforum creates a powerful collaboration between a project team and over two dozen thought leaders, including futurists, cultural anthropologists, consumer psychologists, inventors, artists, and trend spotters who have their pulse on consumers, emerging technology, and societal trends on a global basis.
We start by ensuring everyone has a shared knowledge foundation, so the brainstorming session is as productive and actionable as possible. We work with the client team to create a Transformation Plan that captures the innovation objectives, key insights for innovation, and the Company’s technological competencies.
Once the session starts, participants ideate from anywhere in the world, logging on periodically over the 3 day session, to create, probe, and build on ideas. This has the added advantage of saving on travel and meeting space expense, as well as avoiding the scheduling burden of getting everyone at the same place at the same time—especially difficult for global teams. Over the course of the session, additional expert presentations and creativity exercises are uploaded to the Transforum site to help stimulate divergent thinking. Everyone can see and build on each others’ ideas to create real forward thinking momentum. Artists also contribute sketches to bring ideas to life, providing further stimulation to everyone. Hundreds of ideas and sketches will be generated over the course of the session.
The week following a Transforum session, SpencerHall synthesizes all the ideas that were generated, so team members can rate the potential of each idea. This lets team members reflect on the ideas individually, and at their own pace, rather than in a quick team review which forces consensus.
Once the team has identified the lead directions, SpencerHall develops them into complete consumer-ready concepts, and further refines them via a series of qualitative research, culminating in quantitative screening among the target consumer. Coming out of the Transforum process, a complete portfolio of validated concepts is ready for development.
SpencerHall clients have been thrilled by the wide ranging, breakthrough ideas that are generated. It's a blast," says H. Scott Nesbitt, executive vice president at Healthy Advice Networks, a Cincinnati firm that hired SpencerHall to help revamp the consumer displays it provides for medical offices. On the first day, the panel discussed ideas that Healthy Advice Networks was already considering, such as showing product information on digital screens. "Once you get past that and build on these ideas, that's when you get creative," Nesbitt says.
Similarly, the experts in the Transforum Brain Trust find the experience to be energizing and liberating. Neil Chethik, who is an author, speaker and expert specializing in men's lives and family issues finds it fascinating to be a regular participant, and values being able to let ideas percolate over the 3 day session: "You see something valuable, you sleep on it, think about it some more, and then jump in."
Shawn Achor, who has spent years researching and teaching at Harvard University about Positive Psychology and the Science of Happiness, finds the session allows participants to go deeper to express their ideas, and is energized by the diversity of ideas and opinions. What’s more, "With Transforum, everyone has a voice. Usually in meetings one person dominates. Here, you get ideas that might not come out if the brainstorming was done in person." Best selling science fiction Alma Alexander, another member of the Brain Trust, describes Transforum as, "like popping a balloon and ideas come pouring out."
By blending a project team’s depth of knowledge with the creative freedom of divergent thinkers, Transforum can be a game changing way to create breakthrough new ideas. The question is: are you ready to transform the way you innovate?
