Посты с тэгом: ideation

Got a Great Idea? Don’t Take Credit For It

Published date: February 8, 2016 в 8:10 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

You’ve heard that old adage – “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The same holds true in creativity. We want to resist the temptation of judging ideas depending on where it came from. Yet, its very difficult for us to do this. If we like the person, we tend to like their idea. And if we don’t like that person, well, let’s just say we might see a few more flaws than we might have otherwise.
Now you and your colleagues might not even be aware that you’re doing this. And what this means for you in practice is that you have to find a way to strip ideas of their identity.
You can boost the creative out put of your team just by making sure these ideas don’t get thrown out prematurely. Here’s how you do it. When you’re facilitating a session to generate ideas, announce to the group that there’s a new ground rule and the ground rule is simply this, people cannot put a name to any idea. That means that people are, are going to have to stop saying things like, “hey that was my idea,” or “hey, let’s go back to that great idea that Michael had earlier.”
People will find this hard to do. So, you’re going to have to be firm about the rule.
Another good technique is to tell people that whenever they have an idea, they have to write it down on a piece of paper, again, without putting anybody’s name to it. Every so often go around and collect those pieces of paper, and then pass them out randomly to people in the group, and have people take an idea and read it aloud to the rest of the group. That keeps the ideas anonymous.
And finally, another good technique is to have people work in pairs or groups of three. And whenever they share their idea, they do it as coming form the entire group, not just from one team member. And what this does is it makes it more difficult for other people in the group to figure out where that idea came from. It helps them eliminate that natural tendency to have a bias to that idea. Now these techniques might take a little bit more time and may feel a bit awkward, but trust me it’s well worth it.
You’ll boost you’re creative output at work by making sure good ideas don’t get thrown out too quickly.

Entrepreneurship Education Forum Webinar Series

Published date: December 15, 2014 в 3:00 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,,

On December 3, 2014, the first session of the Entrepreneurship Educators Forum Webinar Series took place. The vision for the project is to create a meeting place for the community to discuss the challenges of teaching entrepreneurship, and to build an open-source platform that will enable us to collect, curate and share knowledge, teaching materials and tools that will help us guide our students effectively. Bill Aulet opened the session with a review of a roadmap for entrepreneurship education at MIT that divides the process into three main stages – nucleation, product definition and venture development.
According to the plan, entrepreneurship education should be structured as a set of modular “buckets” or “tiles” of knowledge, skills and tools that are grouped under the three above mentioned stages. Having identified four student personas with different interests, motivation and needs we are able to recommend a pathway of learning through the tiles that will best meet their aspirations. For example, a “ready to go” entrepreneur who has an idea and a strong team does not need to go through ideation and team-building activities, but needs to dive deeply into product-market fit and primary market research, and then also acquire the knowledge for “Venture Development”.
After discussing MIT’s overarching program, it was time to start our deep dive into the different topics. Each session, we plan to do that with one or two. The goal is to identify the thought leaders and experts in each area beforehand, so they can share their knowledge and initiate a discussion through the webinar series. In this first session, naturally, we started with ideation.
Here is a replay of the session.

Drew Boyd, a 30-year industry veteran who is now Executive Director of the MS-Marketing Program at the University of Cincinnati and co-author of the book “Inside the Box” joined us to present the Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) approach to creativity. The methodology is based on academic research in creativity carried out by Prof. Jacob Goldenberg, Drew’s co-author.
The main pillars of the approach are five techniques that can be applied to existing products/services, to produce new forms that may become valuable inventions. In this case, it is “Function follows form” – we do not start by looking for a problem, but rather find a solution, then look for problems that it may help solve and assess the feasibility of actually developing it. The techniques are based on specific, common patterns that Prof. Goldenberg identified by studying innovative products. Moreover, his research showed these patterns to be quite reliable predictors of market success.
The basic notion is that systematically and intentionally applying the patterns as structured templates to existing products and services will produce a multitude of potential innovative products. The techniques are: Subtraction, Division, Multiplication, Task unification, and Attribute dependency. Drew provided a couple of examples for “task unification”: a barcode sticker for fruit that dissolves in water releasing a special fruit washing detergent, and a baby pacifier that is also a thermometer.
The webinar series is targeted at educators at universities with programs in the innovation, design, and entrepreneurship spaces.

Ideation vs. Prioritization

Published date: August 2, 2008 в 7:30 pm

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,

Ideation or prioritization?  Imagine you had a choice of being really good at one, but not the other.  You could be a master at creating ideas, or you could excel at selecting winning ideas, but not both.  Which would you choose? 
Two things intrigue me about this trade-off.  First, companies spend too much time and energy prioritizing ideas and not enough on creating ideas.  Second, the innovation space seems to demand a completely different set of tools and techniques for selecting ideas than the tools and techniques used for making other business decisions.  In reality, there is no difference.  The tools used to make everyday business decisions should be the same ones used to prioritize ideas. 

I face this issue a lot when speaking about innovation.  “How do you select the best idea to pursue?  How do you know which idea is going to be the next blockbuster?  What is the secret to spotting great ideas?”   I just spoke to an outstanding group of MBA candidates at the Columbia Business School.   One of the students wanted to know my views on this.  It is as though I have a special eye or an innovation Magic Eightball for picking winners.  If you can unlock my formula, you will find the path to riches.  Not even close.

 

In my view, prioritization of ideas is not an innovation issue, and it does not belong in the discussion at all.  The problem of which idea to pursue from among a list of choices is a subject well covered by the behavioral decision sciences.  An amazing body of research exists in this field.  Researchers have described highly effective methods of choice that circumvent the inherent weaknesses of humans in making decisions.  The choices we make in the innovation space are no different.  The choice of which innovation to pursue should be approached the same way one decides on what clothes to wear or what person to marry:  1. consider the criteria that are important, 2. weight those criteria, 3. score each candidate on those criteria, 4. add up the results, and 5. let the chips fall where they are. The highest rated idea is the one you should pursue.  It’s that simple.

 

But innovation choices get special privileges over other choices.  We seem to require methods of choice that deserve royal treatment over other methods of choice.  A cottage industry within a cottage  industry has evolved to create a sense of uniqueness when in fact no uniqueness exists.  A wide variety of special tools have emerged to select and manage ideas.  The good news about many of these tools is that they have the right science built into them.  Here is a sample (from Innovation Tools – thanks, Chuck!)

•
Accolade Idea Management
•
Ameli
•
BrainBank
•
BrightIdea.com
•
Cognistreamer Innovation Manager
•
EGIP Idea-Modul
•
Engage ThoughtWare
•
Idea Management System
•
Idea Reservoir
•
IdeaBox
•
IdeaCenter (Akiva)
•
IdeasTracker
•
IdeaValue
•
Imaginatik
•
Ingenuity Bank
•
Insight Results
•
Jenni Enterprise Idea Management
•
OVO Innovation
•
Prism Idea Management
•
Target Idea Management for mySAP

Executives obsess over  finding the right method to select ideas when they should be more focused on how to generate ideas.  The zeal over prioritization puts a drag on the core issues surrounding innovation such as how to innovate and how to make it routine and part of the culture.   Why do executives sweat more over selecting ideas than generating?  My sense is they feel more accountable when choosing an idea than when generating the idea.  Generating an idea doesn’t carry with it any risk or obligation to spend.  Choosing an idea does both.  If companies want executives to put more priority on generating ideas, they will need to change this.

It is time to strip out this issue entirely from the innovation discussion.  Don’t mix the two.  Put the emphasis on a method to generate many great ideas and not on the method to choose the right one. For that, use the well-established science.  Just as Fortune 100 companies use the well established methods to innovate, we should use well established methods to prioritize innovations.

Measuring the Immeasurable

Published date: February 17, 2008 в 10:27 am

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,

Innovation, like most other things in business, gets caught in the trap of “how do we measure results.”  Innovation managers at Fortune 100 companies find themselves confronted with this question in their efforts to raise innovation capabilities.  In the end, measuring innovation doesn’t matter.  Measuring innovation methods is where the focus needs to be.
The typical approach to measuring innovation is revenue from new products.  The usual question is: “Show me a product generated from an innovation workshop and its first year revenues.  My response to this might be: “And let’s compare that to the revenue NOT produced from ideas NOT generated because of a lack of innovation.”
Some aspects of innovation are immeasurable.  During an innovation workshop several years ago, an engineer in the group had a depressed look on his face.  It struck me as odd particularly because we had just completed a vibrant round of ideation with many new possibilities.  The entire group was energized except this one individual.  Out of concern, I asked him if he was feeling sick or in pain.  What he told me struck me hard.  He said, “No, I’m feeling fine.  It’s just that I NOW realize, after this round of ideation, that an idea that I have been holding onto for a long time…won’t work.”
I remember thinking, “Wow!  What is the value of giving UP a failed idea so that you can now direct your full focus and energy to new pathways?”  This ideation session freed this individual’s mind AND motivation to move in new directions.  He would no longer waste his productive time pursuing a pet idea in favor of better possibilities.  He would begin creating value not from an idea generated, but rather from an idea given up.
How do you measure THAT?
The question is not: “Let’s measure innovation to decide whether we should do it.”  Rather the question should be: “Which innovation method gives us the most results to improve our business?”  Companies should compare methods using simple metrics like: total ideas generated.  From this tally, break it down further to: new ideas versus ideas we already had; ideas actually pursued; ideas likely to be pursued; ideas never to be pursued.  The key is to compare apples to apples.  I once asked a colleague how she liked using a particular method by an innovation consultant in the local area.  She said that she loved it.  I asked, “Compared to what?”  No response.
The best practice from Fortune 100 companies is to build and measure innovation competency…the inputs of growth, not the outputs.

Funding Innovation

Published date: January 10, 2008 в 10:02 pm

Written by:

Category: Uncategorized

Tags: ,,,,,

Mitch Ditkoff takes on the all important issue of how to fund innovation, and writes about innovation slush funds as a way improve innovation results:

What I like about this approach is that it sidesteps the bureaucratic hokey pokey, run-it-up-the-flagpole, command and control, funky chicken shuffle that all too often scuttles powerful new ideas in need of a timely infusion of capital to get them rolling.

From my experience, there are two choices in how to fund innovation:  invention or development.  Invention means the actual genesis of the idea, usually through a concentrated effort or workshop using a proven method.  Development is what you do with the ideas that have commercial merit.  Both take time and money.  The choice depends on whether you think spending the money to generate ideas will yield more than a pool of funds to invest the ideas that you already have.
Fortune 100 companies vary widely in how they approach it.  Some invest in idea generation to create large stocks of potential opportunities.  They invest in innovation teams and processes to keep innovation happening day in and day out.  The ideas generated must compete for resources against the rest of the portfolio of opportunities.  The other approach is to create a bounty like what Mitch has described…a slush fund to motivate and lure the creative people to come up with ideas.
My preference is to fund invention, systematically.  My sense is that employees need to feel there are sufficient resources and sufficient time for them to take the risk of ideating.  By investing in the ideation process, employees feel liberated to give it their all.  I think the idea of a slush fund makes sense if it is used for pure ideation.   Tell people there are dollars available to conduct formal ideation workshops…a slush fund…and they will beat a path to your door.  That’s what I do.   As Mitch puts it:

And remember, as one wise pundit put it, “It’s not the money that starts the idea, it’s the idea that starts the money.”

Fund ideation, and the result will yield more funds.

Get our innovation model that has worked for 1000+ companies.

    No thanks, not now.