Magazine Winter 2014 Research Highlight

The Discipline of Creativity

Ideas can come from anywhere. But that doesn’t mean managers can afford to rely on haphazard, hit-or-miss approaches to idea generation.

Joseph V. Sinfield, Tim Gustafson and Brian Hindo Reading Time: 11 min 

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Businesses win through new ideas: new ideas for products, for developing and refining processes, and for tackling strategic and operational challenges. Given the complexity and volatility that characterize today’s business landscape, the ability to develop creative new ideas is more important than ever. In fact, a recent IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs from more than 60 countries named creativity the most important leadership quality.

But coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. In a business context, creativity is only useful when it leads to innovation. Managers must be able to apply creative thinking in a systematic way that achieves results: revenue growth, delighted customers, a stronger community or some other measure of impact. In addition, ideas must fit with an organization’s strategy or take it in a new, purposeful direction. They must solve real problems for stakeholders such as customers or employees, and they must be able to be tested.

Many brainstorming exercises that companies undertake fall short in this regard. Although such sessions are frequently fun for participants, the output is too often considered impractical just days after the exercise. Against this backdrop, we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn from several domains, including education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy. The seven steps have been honed through our research and client work over the past decade. The first three steps are designed to help managers understand the problem deeply. Steps four through six describe how to generate tangible ideas for solutions. And the final step explains how to translate the ideas into action.

To illustrate the approach, we will describe our recent efforts to develop new approaches for solving a vexing problem involving the distribution of drugs for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Some TB strains have advanced to become resistant to first-line drug treatments, and there are more than 500,000 cases of MDR-TB globally, mainly in India, Russia, China and South Africa. Yet, for a variety of reasons, only about 20,000 of the patients are appropriately treated with quality-assured second-line drugs.

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About the Authors

Joseph V. Sinfield is an associate professor of civil engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a senior partner at Innosight, a global strategy and innovation consulting firm based in Lexington, Massachusetts. Tim Gustafson is a principal at Innosight, and Brian Hindo is a manager at the firm.

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Comments (2)
SOWRIRAJAN TIRUVENGADAM
A innovative insight!!
Step 4 and 5 are different from usual concepts.
Bringing the outside perspective and the diverging of ideas are really useful.
will try to apply these and give fedback.
But what we observe is the challenge of collective participation!!!!
Always we find some teams/members sitting as aliens till the end of the session.

Thanks for sharing!!
Lou Kerestesy
Good stuff, and thank you!  

The article made me recall Nominal Group Technique and its use in Interactive Management, a group problem solving process for complex problems. NGT solves common group problems such as verbal aggressiveness or dominance by subset of members, status or rank inhibition, limited idea generation, premature idea selection, and limitations posed by a predominantly verbal mode of operation limits reflection.

NGT begins with idea generation in a similar manner to that outlined here, then proceeds to idea clarification.  Each idea is captured and the clarification documented.  The clarification is vital in subsequent steps to remind participants of the meaning of an idea.  

NGT also conforms to the Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby, 1958), and support the laws of Requisite Parsimony (Miller, 1956), Requisite Salience (Boulding, 1966), and Requisite Meaning (Apel, 1981) relative to complex design situations. 

The process outlined here expands on idea generation in effective ways, which is critical.  Generating ideas, after all, is just the start!