Managing Creativity and Innovation - Book Review

Review: Books is basically written keeping in mind what the today’s business environment is and how manager should nurture innovation and creativity. It starts with introduction of what innovation is. How industry as a whole go thru incremental and radical innovation. What role dose technology play. It has some interesting tools and techniques from organizational perspective that you can readily apply. Some financial analysis techniques are also part of this book which will tell you how you can evaluate your innovative approach. If you are a manager or are in a decision making position in your organization or an entrepreneur or would be entrepreneur, this book is a good read. It has various examples form the past which helps you understand concepts better. The matter in the book has been collected from various sources.

Key take-away from this book:
Recognizing opportunity: Turning you great idea into a business strategy is tricky. Motorola’s Iridium was a great idea but not a good business opportunity. On the contrary, 3M’s idea to use weak adhesive to make notepaper stick turned out to be a great business opportunity.

You need to ask yourself “What could we do with this?” Clear understanding of the answer to this question is important.

Your opportunity initially may not be able to capitalize on innovation’s full potential. Marconi invented what earlier called as wireless telegraphy in 1890. It was only in 1922 when first transmission of musical entertainment was made using this and radio was born! Same was with internet.

A method for opportunity recognition: Many innovators either fail to recognize opportunity or overestimate them. To understand the likelihood that customer will be attracted to a new product, there is a technique mentioned in this book called buyer utility map. It focuses on innovation’s utility – How it will change the lives of customers. It is a matrix between ‘The Six Utility Leavers’ and ‘The Six Stages of Buyer Experience Cycle

This matrix can be used for:
· Locating new product
· Improving Existing product
· Positioning new product or repositioning existing products
· Market research



This is used to assess the utility of an innovative idea. Ask yourself the following question:

Where can we create the greatest utility for our customers? Dose our idea fills this space?

Is the utility higher or lower than the utility created by the products and services offered by our competitors?

Which of these utilities matters most to customers?

How could we redesign our product or service idea to offer the greatest utility to customers in the area that matters most to them?

For more information on buyer utility, please leave a comment and I will try to get back as soon as possible.

Design and Experience

Life is all about experiences. Good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Primarily whatever we do is for emotionally appealing experiences. Watching movie, listening music, visit to an amusement park and what not. On one hand people pay huge money to have an experience of eating in the ambiance that they want and on the other hand poor people who find it difficult to have three course meals a day are forced to have sad experience.

Very often corporate fail to understand this and the product and services that they offer are merely a product or service and never become experience. iPhone is not just a phone. It’s an experience.

If you need to change your life, you need to first find out what experiences you want to have and then work on them. If you want to change your stagnant business, you need to find what experience people want to have and provide it to them.

Once you know what experience you are looking to build, it’s time to design that experience. Experience is intangible but what makes this happen is a tangible design. Everything around us is a design. Some are bad some are good. One definition of design is ‘Plan something for a specific role or purpose or effect’. For designing, you need to have a specific goal in mind. If this goal meets the requirement of what experience you want to have out of it, it’s a good design. While designing your product or service, you should understand what experience your prospective customers want to have. The other definition of design is ‘The act of working out the form of something’. In all it’s about process as well as product or service.

Design has two perspectives. One is linked with feelings and other with functionality. You should always design in such a way that both these perspectives are fulfilled. This is equally applicable to one’s personal life too.

Design is not something accidental. The process that one needs to follow for design is: first you need to define your goals, conduct research, specify the requirements, develop it, test it, implement it and evaluate it. To redesign, follow the same process and analyze your current design on the same line. Avoid unnecessary complications while designing and explore multiple ways to design. Prototyping and initial market research have proven to be wonderful to estimate your design.

Earlier, industries like music, games, and movies were termed as creative industries. Today every organization need to be creative and ensure that their design represents what is unmet or unrealized.

While designing, ensure that you don’t do any early judgment to eliminate the fear of failure and encourage maximum input for ideation process. Diverge, converge and articulate. Design is subject to personal taste but focusing on creativity, ambidextrous thinking, teamwork, end-user and curiosity has often provided best results.

Overturn your Assumptions

Over a period of time, life has taught us to make assumptions. These assumptions are based on our past experience rather than theories. Assumptions can become so entrenched it doesn't cross our mind to challenge them. We never give second thought to these assumptions or try to challenge them. We make assumptions about people around us, especially if we don't like them. Assumptions are like hurdles for your imagination and this may even be dangerous sometimes. Your subconscious mind based on these assumptions will drive the way you do active thinking or act physically. For instance consider a manufacturing company. The common assumption that your subconscious mind will make is that the workers will approach their respective work. Henry Ford challenged this assumption by making the work go to respective workers and assembly line subverters the industry forever.

It is natural and necessary to make assumptions about our routine activities else we will end up spending all our time analyzing the mundane things. But the implication of this is that we only see what we want or expect to see.

The real problem arises when we make false assumptions. We will end up living with these false assumptions unless our experience proves them wrong. Challenging your assumptions is an important component of creativity. This allows you to look beyond what is obvious or already accepted. And it leads straight to the creative breakthroughs you're looking for.

For solving any problem or improving the way you are currently operating by generating creative ideas, first thing you need to do is list down all the assumptions. Consider all of them. Don’t judge. Remember differing judgment that I posted few days back.

Secondly, reverse all the assumptions. If you want to start a restaurant, common assumption will be like 1. A restaurant will have to serve the food or 2. You will have to charge for the food that you serve in your restaurant. If I reverse these assumptions they will be 1. A restaurant that will not serve the food and 2. A restaurant that will serve the food for free. Interesting. Isn’t it!

Assumption reversal is a left-brain technique. Most people feel most comfortable using their left-brain, so this technique builds confidence in their creativity and gradually breaks them into the creative thinking process.

Now you need to do some amount of brainstorming. You will have to generate as many as possible ideas in order to achieve your reversed assumptions.

You can have a restaurant where food is not served. Customers will carry their own food and will pay for the ambiance and experience that they will have their or the restaurant will offer some of the food items for free and customer will pay for the time that they spent in the restaurant.

This visionary technique rests upon the following ideas:

1. All assumptions are false.
2. All assumptions are limiting.
3. All assumptions are reversible.
4. You have to make assumptions.

So what?

The future is often a reverse of the assumptions of the present. Reverse current perspectives and actions and you have generated a vision of what could be. Assumptions structure social reality. Change your assumptions and you change your reality. Different assumptions produce different consequences. If you like the consequences, you should accept the new assumptions. If the reversed assumption reduces cost, increases quality and improves access, go with it. If the consequence produces the opposite, discard it. Typically, a group has great fun with this visionary technique. It results in vigorous exchanges over the possibility of the reversals.

Too Busy to be Creative

You may be a freelancer, software professional, an entrepreneur or even a CEO; you can always be creative in whatever you do. Someone told me she couldn’t be creative just because she doesn’t get enough time for it. Do you really need the 25th hour to be creative? Creativity is all about doing things differently. It’s just we don’t want to come out of the comfort zone that we have created for ourselves. This comfort zone works as a mental block and prevent us from doing the things in a different way altogether. The very first lesson of creativity is that you should learn to observe and consider things from different perspective. How can you do that if you are again and again repeating the same thing?

At first you will find it difficult to change your normal routine activities or habits. Try wearing the watch in other hand for a day and you will realize. Take a different route to work. Try to be silent during the discussion and just understand what others are doing. You can’t change everything around you. Like, you can’t afford to drive on the left side of the road if you are in US. Start with small. Try changing you sleep hours or may be brushing your teeth with left hand if you are right handed.

You might think why I should change something if I am comfortable doing it the way I do it? The answer is, because you need to gain more insight into what you do physically. “If you will do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.”

A day will come when machines will have emotions. Will you be able to compete with them then? What will differentiate a man and a machine? You might get shocked the day you will hear this news. Just try to be prepared for that day.

What Else But Creativity

Deferring Judgment

Our brain tries to put everything in order. It always tries to make meaning out of something meaningless. It has bad habit of judging. This is intrinsic. The problem is that it’s because of this habit, we the so called grownups lacks the creativity. When we were child, rather than judging, we use to ask questions. Please don’t ignore when next time your child ask what, why or how.

Today we really lack the capability of giving ideas that a child can give. Doesn’t matter how absurd or impractical the idea is, what really matters is how we can make sense out of that. Rather than judging, what primary education needs to teach is how to build over what you think.

In various official meetings I have often seen people judging others view point. By doing this you put a full stop to one great idea. Rather than saying its right or wrong, we should learn to leave it open for discussion. Not decision.

At some point it is important to take immediate decisions. If you are at decision making position in your organization and don’t show this trait, you are in a difficult situation. Well, what I want to say is making defer judgment part of your daily life and slowly you will understand how to shorten the time to reach judgment based on situation.

Whenever IDEO works on any project, they first explore the problem from different perspective. They have multi functional/multi domain people working on their projects. Once the problem is dismantled, it becomes easy for you to reach the solution. Rather I must say best solution.

Please don’t mix sitting on a problem and deferring judgment.

Try and observe as many things as you can around you. Just don’t judge. Do this for some time and feel the difference yourself. Decide a colour each day and see how often you can notice it around you. Believe me you will be amazed. Good luck.

Filling a Sieve With Water

The Teacher had given a discourse on creative thinking. Afterwards his disciples approached him and asked him to set them a problem that required them to think creatively. The sage gave them a sieve and asked them to fill it with water at the sea, nearby. They were gone for a long time. Finally he went down to the beach to see what they were doing, and found them seated morosely around the sieve.


They scrambled to their feet when they saw him.


“You’ve set us an impossible task, sir,” said the oldest of the disciples. “It’s just not possible to fill a sieve with water.”
“Are you sure?” asked the Teacher, picking up the sieve. “Sometimes it helps to step back and view the problem from a different angle.”


He waded into the water and threw the sieve far out into the sea. It sank.
“There!” said the Teacher. “It’s full of water now.”


It is very important to look at a problem from different angles in order to find the best solution, with this attitude we can see that there is no problem that has no solution!