Creating Creative Organization
- Enable real-time, dynamic collaboration to integrate knowledge
Innovation is about combining different bodies of knowledge. When knowledge is integrated, it creates the conditions that stimulate creative people to make the unusual connections that lead to breakthrough ideas. That’s why you need cross-functional teams: to collaborate on a daily basis and ensure that their knowledge is integrated. If you have a dispersed team, then you need to ensure that your social networks are enabled by technology.
- Broaden your range of inspiration
The best business ideas often occur at the intersection of market, customer and technology intelligence. Teams that create the best ideas take the conscious step of carefully selecting the sources of inspiration before they go digging for information. For example, food companies source inspiration from culinary trends, consumer good companies immerse themselves in the consumer experience, and B2B companies spend days in technology scenario planning. Open innovation extends this network of knowledge to the outside world, quickly multiplying the sources of inspiration.
- Remove the fuzziness from the process
To ensure that everyone can contribute, establish a clear process and clarify how the front end of innovation (FEI) process fits with the broader end-to-end innovation cycle. A strong FEI process should include the following steps: clarify the brief, dig for inspiration, create ideas, develop the ideas and, finally, make a decision. The secret to success is to require that the process is followed, but to avoid creating hurdles, gates and governance in the earlier stages.
- Link ideation to corporate strategy
Figure 1Creativity can produce a lot of ideas, but business value increases when creativity is channeled to priority areas. A lot of patents are traded or sold every year because they represent relevant customer solutions that could not be supported by the company’s business model. Establish your strategic arenas and innovation requirements early.
- Transform business requirements into innovation requirements
After clarifying the strategic arenas, translate them into requirements specific to innovation. This leads to innovation domains, which reside at the intersection between mega-trends and unmet consumer needs relevant to the strategic arena. Adding your technical competencies and complementary assets leads to the development of innovation platforms.
- Fully develop ideas
The most successful product launches are the ones that are able to deliver on a number of the promised domain advantages and across each and every one of the customer experience’s touchpoints. On the other hand, concepts that are swiftly scaled but only “half cooked” often fail, despite how great they may be. Make sure that your company takes the time to think about concepts that compliment one another and then integrate them.
The role of the leader of innovation is crucial. If you get people excited, they will feel respected and valued. Change is more likely to last if people are rewarded for doing things they want to do, like working together and building on other people’s ideas. At the same time, just saying things isn’t enough. To have a successful FEI process, companies need to set up a leadership team that keeps track of progress and gets rid of organisational barriers, as well as separate teams that are in charge of breaking new ground.
Companies that have a lot of creative people and can connect them through open innovation are off to a great start. But good ideas don’t come from nowhere, and mastering the beginning stages of innovation takes more than just creativity. Philosopher Norman Podhoretz said, “Innovation is a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of a child and its apparent opposite, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined intelligence of an adult.” To master the beginning stages of innovation, you need both creativity and discipline.