Creativity and Innovation in Entrepreneurship - Notes

                          CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND IDEA GENERATION

General objectives:

Have an overview of Innovation.

Specific objectives:

By the end of the topic the learner should be able to:

i)                     Differentiate the terms, creativity, Innovation and Idea generation.

ii)                  Compare different schools of thought in defining entrepreneurship.

iii)                Relate entrepreneurship observations

A.    IDEA GENERATION:

Introduction

Virtually all innovation processes include the creation or identification of opportunities and the selection of one or more of the most promising directions. When a movie studio creates a new feature film, it typically considers several hundred plot summaries, a few of which are selected for further development. When a company decides upon the branding and identity for a new product, it creates dozens or hundreds of alternatives, and picks the best of these for testing and refinement. When a consumer goods firm develops a new product, it typically considers many alternative concepts before selecting the few it will develop further. Generating the raw ideas that feed subsequent development processes thus plays a critical role in innovation. The success of idea generation in innovation usually depends on the quality of the best opportunity identified. In most innovation settings, an organization would prefer 20 bad ideas and 1 outstanding idea to 21 merely good ideas. In the world of innovation, the extremes are what matter, not the average or the norm (Dahan and Mendelson (2001), Terwiesch and Loch (2004) Terwiesch and Ulrich (2009)). This objective is very different from those in, for example, manufacturing, where most firms would prefer to have 21 production runs with good quality over having 1 production run with exceptional quality followed by 20 production runs of scrap. When generating ideas, a firm makes choices by intention or default about its creative problem solving process.

What’s an idea?

An idea is an output of creativity. It’s closely related to:

Create: Bringing forth that which never existed.

Synonyms for create: conceive, discover, design, father, imagine, initiate, invent, set up, produce etc.

Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.

Good Ideas

An “idea” is not an “opportunity”

An opportunity has the qualities of being attractive, durable and timely and is anchored in a product or service which creates or adds value for its buyer or end user

Components of idea generation:

a)    Creativity & Innovation:

Creativity is the ability to bring forth something new into existence

Innovation is the process of doing new things

Innovation is therefore transformation of creative ideas into useful applications.  Creativity is then a prerequisite to innovation

Innovation:“Creativity + commercialization = innovation

b)     Creativity and the Brain Functioning:

Our brain like the rest of human anatomy is made up to two halves.

a.       Left brain

b.      Right brain

There is a big fold that goes from front to back in our brain, essentially dividing it into two distinct and separate parts.  This link is called corpus collosum.

It wires the right hand brain to the left hand brain.

        

 Note:

Our personality can be thought of as a result of the degree to which these left and right brains interact or in some cases do not interact.

We draw on specific sides of our brains depending on the situation – life experiences and education. Children rank highest in creativity (right brain) before entering school.

Education places a higher value on left brain skills like maths, logic and language than it does on drawing or using our imaginations.

Studies on creativity indicate that at adult level only 10% of people are as creative as when they were 7 years old and that high creativity remains in only about 7% of the population.

c)     Creative Process:

Holt 2002, identifies five basic stages in the creative process

1.      Idea germination (recognition):

The seeding stage

Characterized by interest in or curiosity about some specific problem or area of study

2.     Preparation (rationalization)

Conscious search for knowledge about the idea

Seeking information about possible solutions

3.     Incubation (fantasizing)

Allowing the rational idea to incubate in the subconscious mind to find resolution

Subconscious assimilation of the information

Assimilation into own system

4.     Illumination (realization)

Recognition of the idea as a feasible one

Occurs when the idea resurfaces as a realistic creation

5.     Verification

Application or test to prove that the idea has value

Is the development stage of refining knowledge into application

Many ideas will fall by wayside when verified

Outcome is opportunities

d)    Creativity Blocks: Constitutes,

·         Perceptual

·         Emotional

·         Cultural/Environmental

·         Intellectual/expressive

             Perceptional blocks; constitutes,

·         Stereotypes: seeing what is familiar

·         Isolating the problem

·         Delimiting the problem too closely

·         Inability to have multiple views of the problem

·         Saturation

Emotional blocks; involves,

·         Fear of mistakes

·         Inability to tolerate ambiguity

·         Premature judgment

·         Inability to incubate

·         Change as a problem or an addiction

·         Relation between fantasy and reality

Cultural/Environmental blocks; are,

·         Taboos (language usage, people interaction)

·         Fantasy and reflections as marginal poor-valued activities where

‘Children can play, adults cannot’.

·         Social pressure (remember your high school times?)

·         Tradition is good (change is evil)

·         Capitalism (money can fix anything)

           Intellectual blocks; involves,

·         Language (visual, rhetoric, formal…)

·         Language as responsible for the wiring of your brain

·         Language and it expressive boundaries

·         Catastrophic: “The exact formulation is the only way to go”

e)      Innovation:

There exists a wide range of definitions:

          Synthesized definition:

                  Innovation is the creative regeneration and application of new ideas that can achieve significant improvements in a product, activity, structure, program or policy.

    Components of innovation

o   Subject of innovation – product, service, activity, structure, program, policy etc.

o   New ideas

o   Application – put to work, exploited, practically implemented

o   Significant change – not just minor incremental change, something important

f)      Methods of Improving Creativity

Brain storming                                               Lateral thinking

Matrix thinking                                              Attribute listing

Systems thinking                                            Systems thinking