{"id":905,"date":"2013-07-05T13:12:31","date_gmt":"2013-07-05T11:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fue-blog.de\/?p=905"},"modified":"2013-10-22T13:37:12","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T11:37:12","slug":"creativity-a-collaborative-group-effort-or-the-result-of-a-solitary-struggle-of-individuals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fue-blog.de\/?p=905","title":{"rendered":"Creativity: a collaborative group effort or the result of a solitary struggle of individuals?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe need great ideas!\u201d \u2013 says the top management! That\u2019s the simple goal of innovation often given as a guideline to the innovation manager of the company. The innovation manager then has the task to find good ways of stimulation idea creation. How can you do it? Read the following paragraphs to find out more!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everybody knows (or assumes) that good ideas are based on creative work by a team mixed with well-educated professionals, and experienced staff from different disciplines. This could consist of the prolific sales guy, the \u201cI\u2019ve seen it all\u201d-engineer and the strategic thinking business development manager. Every so often, it\u2019s good to add someone who gives fresh input from out of the box. In German, there is the nice word \u201cQuerdenker\u201d for such a person \u2013 a \u201ccross thinker\u201d who can take things into a different perspective. He or she adds new aspects, questions old rules which are taken as a premise, adds fresh ideas, and asks many \u201cdumb questions\u201d stirring the discussion and the creative process.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s add all these guys together, put them into a room, add a few creativity methods and a discussion moderator. Let them brainstorm and discuss in the workshop \u2013 and out come many good ideas, right? You might even add some outsiders (customers, researchers, etc.) and call it \u201clead user workshop\u201d. But how successful will this be to really create good ideas?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at another perspective: Some people think that collaboration for creating new ideas is overstated. For instance, in an article in the New York Times<\/a>, Susan Cain makes the point that \u201cpeople are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.\u201d\u00a0 She cites a study by psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi<\/a> and Gregory Feist<\/a> and adds \u201cthe most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted\u201d. Isaac Newton<\/a> and Steve Wozniak<\/a> are presented as examples. Check out the article, a well written piece which combines the mentioned research results with historical evidence and a lot of common sense.<\/p>\n

So does that mean brainstorming sessions and innovation workshops are useless? Should we all shut our doors, spend hours in confinement while seeking a genius solution to our current problem?<\/p>\n

Practical experience from an industrial company<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s have a look at reality and practical application and some observations from my work as an innovation practitioner in the last few years: From my experience, the search for good new ideas should always start with a well-defined problem and a good innovation team to find and elaborate on ideas: see above!<\/p>\n

In the literature and the lectures at university, the problems one might deal with are often colorful topics, which are fun to work on. Unfortunately, in a practical setting, the situation is often different and much less exciting. There is a current problem bothering the company, which is hard to tackle and a solution is urgently needed.\u00a0 The question might be something very specific such as \u201cHow could a cleaning device be built to pre-clean parts before coating them?\u201d with a long lists of technical conditions coming along. And yes, the competitors have found good solutions before you, there are a couple patents around blocking some approaches, there might a special technical competency missing in the team, and after all, you don\u2019t have much money available for the required R&D activities. That\u2019s all \u201cvery motivating\u201d to begin with.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the conventional way in many industrial companies to tackle this problem would be to assemble a team, give them a short advance note (such as a phone call or an email) and then get them together an innovation workshop. The team you have assembled has agreed to work on this for a day, and you send them some material to prepare themselves (the problem, some background, the customer requirements, what has been done in the past, etc.). Everybody gets together, but many didn\u2019t have time to prepare themselves for the event. The discussion is structured and some creativity methods are used to support the process.\u00a0 Fair enough! In addition to that, I would recommend to use these elements:<\/p>\n