Creativity is a part of the innovation process. Often the two are confused as synonyms but innovation includes creativity as a tool or skill (depending on how you believe it happens), not the other way around. Finding a way to generate new ideas involves creativity. Robert Fritz makes some nice distinctions between creating and creativity in his book Creating: A practical guide to the creative process and how to use it to create anything - a work of art, a relationship, a career or a better life.
He notes that everyone can learn to create something even though we each have different degrees of talent in creativity.One definition of innovation reads, "to create something new or perceived as new." So the act of creating is fundamental to innovation--bringing ideas to fruition so that they are perceived as new. This newness is important. See my last post on entropy and negentropy for more details, but it's the newness that allows an organization to create a value gap between them and their nearest competitors. That's also why it's still a good packaging and advertising trick to put the word "new" on an item that is basically the same as the last iteration. People are drawn towards something new and different. That ability to draw people to a product or service allows its price or quality or content to be leveraged up, thereby increasing its value not only to the organization that produces it but hopefully to the customers who buy it, the workers who make it and the shareholders who own it.Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. A good idea is as rare as a good system for executing good ideas. Everything in life that is of enduring value is challenging to conceive and bring to fruition.Finding good ideas has been a topic for centuries, probably since before Archimedes shouted "Eureka" from his bath. One technique that we use is subtraction.First, frame the challenge that needs to be innovated. For example, we were writing a bid on some work and the final fee was too high. Or, we had a client that wanted to completely innovate the way education happened at their medical school.Second, find something that you believe you can't live without and subtract it from the equation. In writing the bid, we removed two phases of work. Then we asked ourselves how we could still meet the objectives of the RFP with the two phases removed. We worked until we understood how that could happen. That cut half the fee. Our medical education client chose to remove tuition from the equation: imagine a medical school that charges no tuition. They worked diligently with this idea to really try to design a school that didn't charge tuition.Third, play with the ideas until something cool emerges. After we cut the fee in half, we felt that we had lost our distinctiveness with respect to the rest of the field of contenders. While noodling through this challenge, we cut the duration of the proposed phases by 90% and again asked how we would accomplish that. The answer emerged, much to the surprise of us all. Our medical school client while wrestling with the no tuition subtraction discovered several other interesting ideas along the way. These ideas get catalogued because they're really the object and purpose of the exercise. The client also happened to discover a way to conduct a medical college without charging tuition. It's rare for this to actually happen in a subtraction exercise, though.Fourth, catalog the ideas that emerge and then begin to build models around them. Once the cool ideas emerge, build some models around them to test them. When you test, don't test in order to tear down but in order to build up and strengthen. It's easy to destroy things in this world. It's so much harder to build them. So take even the ideas that don't seem so strong and work diligently to strengthen them. I guarantee you that something excellent and valuable will pop out.The keys to the whole exercise are two: (1) subtract something from the equation that appears to be absolutely necessary and, (2) play with the remaining challenge with all you've got. Suspend any sense of impossibility. If you believe that what you've subtracted can't actually be subtracted, you'll never jump to the new perspective that allows you to see new ideas. You need to fool yourself and suspend your disbelief long enough to get to the cool ideas.
