5 Tips to Boost your Organisation’s Creativity
19/04/2021
It is a myth that the best innovations just ‘happen’ from the ideas of a few creative geniuses. Many of the most successful innovative organisations have put a structured design process in place and created dedicated multidisciplinary teams that focus solely on reinvention. So, how do you get your ideas to have real impact and create value for your customer and organisation?
Here are 5 practical tips you can implement now to boost your organisation’s creativity…
1. Creativity needs a strategy
What is your vision? Where do you see your organisation in 5 years? Will you still exist in 10 years? That’s an honest question not many companies dare to truly ask themselves.
Including a concrete innovation ambition into your organisation strategy is very valuable. This ambition should determine the innovation focus and align your efforts. A good innovation ambition doesn’t just focus on how to innovate the core of the organisation, but it also emphasises the long term perspective of your organisation. Which trends and customer insights should we act on, and equally important…which should we ignore?
Making innovation an explicit part of your organisation’s strategy showcases the importance of it to your whole organisation and signals that innovation is something that needs to be managed differently from the day to day business. “The companies we’ve found to have the strongest innovation track records can articulate a clear innovation ambition; have struck the right balance of core, adjacent, and transformational initiatives across the enterprise; and have put in place the tools and capabilities to manage those various initiatives as parts of an integrated whole.” (Nagji & Tuff, Harvard Business Review)
Practical tip: think about what trends will affect your organisation in the next 10 years and make a trend map. How will they affect your business? Will your organisation be the disruptor or be disrupted?
2. Find the problem before you start finding a solution
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” said Albert Einstein.
Do you know what your customer’s or employee’s frustrations are? Do you understand their needs? Spending dedicated time finding out what bothers your customers or employees will ensure that the solutions created will actually solve real issues and fulfil actual needs.
Practical tip: get out of your comfort zone once in a while and find 30 minutes to talk to a customer. You will be surprised at what you find!
3. Creativity knows no hierarchy
The best ideas usually don’t come from the boardroom. Listening to frontline employees who are in direct contact with the customer or patient can give you surprisingly valuable insights. Making sure that these people feel safe enough to voice their ideas is important. And, not only frontline employees, but every employee in the organisation can offer valuable ideas. Working in multidisciplinary teams and bringing together multiple perspectives is key to enhancing the innovativeness of your ideas.
Practical tip: in brainstorming sessions, don’t only invite the usual suspects, but broaden your group. Have every member of the session first write down their ideas individually in silence, and invite all members to share their ideas before you continue to assess the ideas that are shared. This prevents you from going into tunnel vision and makes sure that every voice counts instead of only the loudest one.
4. Explore more!
Don’t think that you have found the right solution too soon. We are naturally inclined to become a big fan of our own ideas as soon as we have thought of them and got them out there. Pushing yourself and your team to come up with lots of different solutions, going in different directions, using various ideation techniques, will yield many more innovative ideas than sticking to the first ideas your team comes up with.
Practical tip: there are many creativity-stimulating exercises, try some, it will be fun. Associative thinking is a simple one to start with. Associate the problem you are trying to solve with a certain brand: for instance Instagram, how would they solve this issue? Think of the peer-to-peer networking character that Instagram thrives on. You could let each team member think of a different company, or link your problem to an animal, a movie, an industry trend.
5. Failure is the way to success
According to HBS professor Clayton Christensen, 95% of all product innovations fail, and according to the Startup Genome report, 92% of startups fail. So, with this in mind, make that failure as cheap and fast as possible. Rather than working out a new idea right up to its implementation in the market, only to find out there is no market, think of ways to validate ideas as early as possible using rapid prototyping methods. Prototyping is common in product innovation and software design; however, prototyping can be just as effective in the creation or improvement of services. Designing a visual customer journey is a good way to start.
Practical tip: create a storyboard where you draw every step your customer will experience in the interaction with your new product or service. This will help you make your idea more concrete, but it also tests and checks whether your imagined new product or service makes sense. For even more insight, try walking a customer through your storyboard to get their feedback.
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Design thinking
In our Masterclass Design Thinking your entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, and problem-solving skills are being put centre stage. Our goal is to grow your innovation capacity by introducing you to the successful Design Thinking methodology.
Taking the next step
Want to know more or experience a creative ideation session yourself? The Service Science Factory would love to meet you and see how we can help boost your organisation’s creativity!
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Carmen Vonken
Innovation Project Leader & Coach at UMIO | Service Science Factory
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