It often seems that being innovative is a privilege of the wealthy. Those who have the time to invent and innovate are most probably not busy with everyday survival. Or are they?
Constraints enhance creativity. When resources are limited or have been exhausted, constraints have a ball; and so does creativity.
For example, lack of access to safe drinking water is a critical problem in poor countries around the world. Every year, thousands of people die from infectious diseases, brought on by polluted water. PlayPumps International has come up with a successful, creative solution to the problem: a merry-go-round that pumps water into a storage tank, while children have fun riding it round and round. What is so brilliant about this idea is its simplicity. Kids at play spin the merry-go-round anyway, so the system uses an existing resource to achieve a new objective, improving the quality of life for the entire village.
SIT is a great tool to make innovation happen. But why do we need innovation?
I will skip the obvious: innovation is needed to adapt to an ever changing commercial, social and technological environment.
Apart from the above, innovation is needed to generate something that almost every business needs to survive: attention.
Like any other resource that businesses need (e.g. energy, employees, row materials etc.) attention can be purchased in the market in the form of advertising, public relations or even search engine optimization. The problem is that its price is going up every day.
With more than 1000 commercial messages (explicit and implicit) any individual in developed countries is exposed to each day, it’s getting harder and harder to get the message through. .
Innovation can lower the price of getting attention:
Amnon and I presented last week in Greener by Design (GbD) in San Francisco, subtitled “Greener Products for Leaner Times”. Our innovation message for companies working on going greener was to focus on finding and tackling their fixedness.
Cognitive Fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage. This often blocks us from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems. SIT tools help break 3 kinds of cognitive fixedness:
1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt. Many of SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness. The following water saving toilet (click to check out the cool animation!) was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop. Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water. This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to be the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.
2. Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function. SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness. My previous post described several such uses of unexpected resources for generating energy.
Despite the innovative, inventive image I am accredited with (for no substantial reason), the mobile phone in my possession until two weeks ago was of one of the very first generations, and it certainly fulfilled my basic communications needs. However, during my last family trip to Ein Tamir (a water-filled spring tunnel in Nahal Kziv) I accidentally left my phone in my pocket and as I emerged from the water, soaked through, I found that the instrument had ceased to function. About an hour later, at home, I deconstructed the device and, using my daughter’s hair dryer (”utilization of existing resources”, or in SIT lingo – implementing the rule of Task Unification) I succeeded in making the phone functional again… with the exception of the display screen that could not be revived.
While my wife and daughter (clearly post-modern women as made obvious by their choice of mobile phones) began pressuring me to get rid of the device and replace it with one of a more advanced generation, I kept considering what could possibly be done with a screen-less yet functional mobile phone. The idea that flashed through my mind, spiced with a bit of black humor, was “Why not sell it to a blind person?”
But now a little more seriously… Any SIT New Product Development (NPD) workshop addressing mobile phones would inevitably, in a structured and systematic manner (by applying the Subtraction tool), reach the potential product: a mobile telephone for the blind. The end product would have no display screen (the subtracted component), but would have supporting functions appropriate specifically for a blind user. Continue reading ‘Do we really need inventive thinking tools?’
Through the use of over 100 advertisement examples and numerous case studies, Cracking the Ad Code provides you with practical tools for quick production of creative ideas in marketing communications.
The book includes a mixture of systematic analysis of the creation aspect of advertising, together with a taste of the real world of advertising and what makes it work.
Marketing professionals in companies will learn what to expect from their agencies, whilst agencies will be able to explain their work to clients in an analytic language that is easily understood.
Sources of creative inspiration can take different forms. One such form can be the communication objectives, included in the creative brief to the advertising agency. Now, this may sound odd! I mean, ask any art director/copy writer and you’ll hear that these objectives are the least inspiring element in the entire process!
So, how can we make our objectives more inspiring?
Take this Cannes Lions winning ad for Softlan Ultra by Y&R Malaysia for example:
Advertising Agency: Y&R, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Creative Directors: Rahul Mathew, Rowan Chanen
Art Directors: Richard Chong, Scott McClelland
Copywriter: Rahul Mathew
Retouching: Magic Cube
One possible way to describe the objective of this campaign is: “Sell more Softlan” or “The softest fabric conditioner”. As a matter of fact, this is one of the most popular ways that clients phrase objectives in their briefs to the agency. But, just think of the poor copywriter who gets yet another brief asking him to “sell more”. These guys get dozens of such requests each week and are expected to come up with a completely new creative idea each and every time.
This is the first of a series of posts discussing innovation barriers. This series will not encompass all that can be said on the subject. That would take a series of books. It will describe, however, several types of barriers we face when we try to innovate. It will also discuss these barriers in relation to the innovation methodologies that have been developed to address them.
Dr. Gadi Segal, a business partner and a good friend, told me once that “the more therapeutic options you have for a disease, the more likely it is that none of them is really effective.”
When I make the analogy to the realm of innovation I hesitate to conclude that none of the innovation methodologies available is really effective… Let’s just agree that the abundance of approaches and technique is indicative of the magnitude of the challenges posed by innovation.
Modern American poets John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz and Anne Sexton were all hospitalized for bipolar disorder during their lives. And many painters and composers, among them Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Mingus and Robert Schumann were similarly afflicted.
The belief that “madness” is related to creativity is not limited to artistic creativity. Consider for example the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, which tells the story of Nobel Laureate in economics, John Nash, who suffered from Schizophrenia.
