So You Need A Better Way To Innovation? Now What?

paper planes taking flight

So You Need A Better Way To Innovation? Now What?

Are you tired of the innovation chaos? Are you worn down from the 1,000 new ideas and technologies? Wondering how to build an effective AI strategy that creates value? If you said yes to any of these, then you are ready for a proven, practical approach to enterprise innovation — it is time for Intentional Innovation! 

We live in a world full of amazing new inventions, and each one comes with both a promise and a price. If your organization is going to survive the chaotic ride that modern innovation presents, you need a plan to target, ideate, develop, and launch your big ideas. Market disruption is no longer only for the startups and the billion-dollar businesses. Discovering novel solutions and getting these big ideas off paper and into implementation requires a proven process that drives alignment and forward motion. And that’s where Teaming Worldwide comes in.  

Ideas to Implementation

Ideas to Implementation is an in-depth, five-part series that zeroes in on fostering creativity that leads to innovation and success, while dodging the inhibitors and roadblocks that keep you from moving forward. 

Participants:

  • Gain methods and mindsets to develop a deep understanding of their customers
  • Apply methods that will help turn customer needs into human-centered solutions
  • Inspire teams and build confidence to take on new challenges.
  • Understand the roles of human-centered design techniques in large scale innovation

We utilize tailored, customized approaches to help businesses of all sizes create safe environments in which to ideate and implement. Our goal is to lead you to identify and execute expectations and agreements around innovation, to ignite creativity amongst teams and decision makers, and to find direct, easy-to-navigate pathways to innovation success. And we do it all while having fun. Seriously. 

All Aboard

We delivered dozens of Ideas to Implementation training sessions in 2023 and are offering a steep, one-time BOGO discount in the month of February for new clients ready to take their ideas from the white board to fruition. Schedule a discovery call today to unlock the deal!

Intentional Innovation® Powered by Teaming Worldwide

Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

An Innovation Leader’s Quest for Credibility

An Innovation Leader's Quest for Credibility

Notes from the Field

In a recent one-day workshop with a group of healthcare executives, the frustration arose that innovation leaders (i.e., those whose portfolio covers innovative investments) must fight for the credibility of the innovation program in ways that their counterparts do not need to. These innovation leaders felt their existence was constantly being called into question, even today, when innovation leadership is needed more than ever in healthcare.  

This exchange got me thinking about how important credibility is to a leader whose charge is to innovate. The act of creating the next generation of products and services involves making promises that are inherently risky. So when we are making a series of risky bets in new technologies and solutions, our stakeholders sometimes conflate these individual risks with the overall innovation program. 

Moreover, an organizational leader must possess a high degree of credibility already in order to operate effectively. Yet, the leader’s individual credibility is not always extended to the innovation function. So there is a disparity – a tremor in the force that must be continuously addressed for innovation to excel. We must evolve our stakeholders capacity for taking risks and making big bets.

An innovation leader would do well to have methods and tools for reinforcing the essential promise of innovation. 

Innovation comes in many different forms, however the leadership function at the heart tends to have golden threads across all innovation programs. As we go about innovating new and inventive ways to grow the business, four particular leadership practices may be useful: 

 

  • Set the Vision. In the messy work of a typical innovation program, we see pivots and fast failures, and early partnerships come and go, and strange new business models. We need a compelling, articulate vision of the future that overrides the individual portfolios. 
  • Engage Others. The leader should be meeting with teams, learning and hearing many perspectives. Engagement is a multi-sided game, so the leader needs great EQ to do this effectively.  Leadership begins and ends with people – and therefore engagement is the first task. 
  • Be A Sense Maker. Innovation leaders are storytellers and sense makers. How does AI fit into the future of our organization? How will we work with robots in the future? These questions should be storylines that evolve over time in order to form innovation narratives to help other leaders and teams make sense of the wide open future.   
  • Manage Creativity. We need deeply creative teams that can blow up the assumptions of today’s business and reformulate new models for tomorrow. But how do we do this without causing panic? Begin by building firewalls around the creative process – make it safe for stakeholders to engage in a full throated creative agenda. But also ensure that that process has a conclusion and the results are filtered through analytical tools like risk management.
A leader’s stock-in-trade is credibility.

Without it, she has no ability to build trust, influence others, or create momentum.  Leading an innovation program is a potential cred-killer, so the leader must take care to position herself accordingly.  

Want to talk more about leadership and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

You may also enjoy this related article: A Quick Reflection on Grit.

A Simple Tool to Ignite Workplace Creativity

An innovator smiles, pointing to a lightbulb signifying her creativity in the workplace

Workplace Creativity

Do your best ideas hit you in the shower? Or maybe during your workout?

This is not uncommon. Creative insights often happen on the periphery of our rational thought. Driving or daydreaming – we are able to make insights and connections that our logical brain doesn’t always see. Corporations like IBM have been teaching executives creativity since the 1950s. The rationale is that complex problem solving skills creates better managers and leaders through their ability to challenge assumptions, think in opposition, and derive new insights from unorthodox places. IQ alone is not enough. 

 

Case-in-point: the amazing work of Dr. George Land. In the early 1960s, to help select the best engineers and scientists in the race to the moon, NASA brought in Dr. Land. His role was to implement an assessment model for complex problem solving that included creativity. The challenge NASA leadership faced was that the organization had been on a hiring spree and getting lots of PhDs, yet the hiring teams could not effectively understand which candidates were going to have the right stuff. They needed experts who possessed a mix of creativity and intelligence to solve the new breed of challenges that NASA was encountering. 

 

The moon launch required astrophysicists, metallurgists, propulsion experts, chemists, materials engineers — specialized personnel who had to work together in never-before ways. The challenge was a low correlation between smart candidates and complex problem solving. And the missing link was creativity. Many early PhDs were bounced out or relegated to less important work tracks due to their lack of imagination. Think about those scenes from Apollo 13 when a team of rocket scientists were trying to create a CO2 filter to save Tom Hanks and the crew…with duct tape! 

But we jumped ahead...

Dr. Land, a researcher and social scientist with a penchant for creativity, developed a test that looked beyond IQ. He delved into whether a person could think along a critical scale as well as a creative scale to generate enough ideas to get to viable solutions. The assessment tool worked exceptionally well, resulting in many successful hires, an eagle landing on the moon, and later, perhaps most importantly, Tom Hanks making it back to Hollywood. 

And so, George Land, wanting to dive deeper into the core of creativity, began what would become a multi-decade longitudinal study. He tested the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from three-to-five years old who were enrolled in a Head Start program. Additionally, he used a similar construct at NASA and re-tested those same children at 10 years old, 15 years old, 21 and beyond. And the results were astounding: there was a steep drop-off of creativity as the participants grew up: 

5 year olds: 98% scored genius 

10 year olds: 30% scored genius

15 year olds: 12% scored genius

 

What all of this means

By age 31, a mere 2% of the original participants scored in the “genius” level of creativity. In the years since, the test has been administered nearly 300,000 times to adults and the 2% holds steady. 2%…the same consistency as skim milk. 

Ultimately, he found we are born with high degrees of creativity. It turns out it is natural and essential to our growth as humans. However, somewhere between nursery school, standing in line at the DMV, barely passing BioChem, staring at YouTube for 10,000 hours, job hunting, and other assorted attempts at adulting, we effectively unlearn creative thinking over time. Our brains have turned to skim milk, creatively speaking. And, we fear the blank page, we are afraid to stand at the white board, we don’t offer ideas in the staff meeting anymore. Or worse, we let Loudmouth Bob talk over everyone when we have a good solution in mind.  

This dearth of creativity is a national challenge, and you can see the lack of imagination wherever you go. You see it in sterile playgrounds designed by lawyers, or those ugly aisle end-caps heaping over with unlovely, forgettable things. And we see this lack of imagination in missed client expectations and lost sales because we offered them skim milk instead of cream. 

Furthermore, we’ve gotten very good at putting up critical filters between us and the flow state of creativity. The critical filter is that voice inside our heads telling us “that won’t work,” or “silly idea,” or “I don’t know.” It also tells us that it’s easier to be a 2-percenter, better to fit in. 

To get to the heavy cream, we need to turn off the critical filters.  However, don’t fret – 98% of us began with genius levels of creativity, so most of us are good to go…most…you know who you are…

The challenge is to get back to deep creativity. But how?

The best ideas come from strong teams, so you need to start by building trust.  Like a musical group riffing on certain melodic themes, pro-innovation teams use techniques like opposition and non-sequitur to spur deeper insights into new products and business models. And so, try this exercise for fun…

  1. Gather the team: set the intention to do great work – it creates a strong container. Psychological safety is important  especially if this is a new skill.  
  2. Tell the team: In two minutes, come up with as many ideas as possible to reinvent a light bulb. It can be broken, cut, reassembled, buried, cooked, placed, frozen, glued, planted, or anything else. Use the filament, the screw piece, the glass, the frosting, etc.  
  3. Go for quantity:  not quality. We don’t care if they are good ideas – ‘logical’ and ‘useful’ are critical filters that will stifle flow. Go for 20 ideas in 2 minutes. 
  4. Read out the best ideas:  the silliest or most inventive – and do it again. By the way, the average in Round 1 may be 5 or 7 ideas per person. Look for the high producers – 12 or more – they are your natural-born creatives. 
  5. After 2-3 rounds, inject a new concept:  “What is the opposite of reinventing a lightbulb?” And go again. 

And, as you will see, the quantity and depth of creativity will increase as people reengage in this flow. Now, try this exercise to invent a new product, or rethink your supply chain, or disrupt the staffing paradigm.

Trust the process – you are a creative genius.  

The approach works!

The two-minute clock creates heat and the quantity lowers inhibitions. These key ingredients open the door to workplace creativity. At Teaming Worldwide, we use this concept of workplace creativity regularly with engineers, scientists, medical professionals, executives, sales reps – you name it. We see them unlock the gate to creativity like wizards in Middle Earth. 

 

In 2008, the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York inducted a curious item into the Toy Hall of Fame: The Stick. The Almighty Stick! It is perhaps the oldest toy in the world. Why it wasn’t inducted 1000 years ago is beyond me! But isn’t it amazing to watch a five-year-old pick up a stick and suddenly have a pet, a ray gun, a rocket – or all three in succession. It reminds me that we were all once that kid – we have the ability to get lost in creative thought. 

 

So, is it time to tap into your 5-year old genius?  Go ahead – take a hot shower and find out! 

 

Want to talk more about creativity and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

 

You may also enjoy this related article: Find Your Spark of Madness.