Sometimes we think there is no way to improve on a technology, no way to to make it more human, more beautiful, more zen. Sometimes it seems like there is an impenetrable wall to advancement. Today’s case study shows otherwise.
The Lunar Baby Thermometer
This wonderful, ergonomic, new forehead thermometer just SCREAMS human touch! Designed by Duck Young Kong, this design is simple, elegant and just plain cool. It is almost like there isn’t a thermometer there and yet the person takes the temperature and touches the patient in a loving manner.
The exercise in creativity for today? Find something commonplace and redesign it. There’s always room for improvement.
The folks over at Open Innovators have created this excellent guide to online innovation and entrepreneurship. I’ve touched on some of these briefly but they break down the entire process, step by step with the associated resources. Bookmark it or print it out. I’ve already cross-referenced this multiple times.
It does help to remind ourselves though that there are great resources out there, especially for prototyping, moldbuilding, etc., that might not be web-based per se, but have excellent response times and the price for their services is excellent.
A recent study was done Crown Plaza Hotels on when and where people are most creative. According to the survey 10pm was most creative time and least creative around 4:30pm.
While this research was done as part of the launch of their new “Think Notes”, there are multiple interesting findings in this survey :
Nearly a third of people questioned felt that removing themselves from the traditional daytime office environment let their creativity run wild.
Fifty-eight per cent of respondents admitted to forgetting their best ideas when failing to write them down immediately.
Interestingly, four out of five people questioned found that when they did note down an idea they would never lose it.
The survey also found that women are the most effective at recording their best ideas with 37 per cent of them choosing to scribble notes on the back of a tissue or napkin. This narrowly beat the back of receipts, the back of the hand and cigarette packets as the most preferred means of on-the-go note-making for both sexes.
The take-aways are clear:
Record your ideas
Use your creative times wisely
Use your uncreative times efficiently
But remember-don’t let yourself be subject to the whims of time and space! There are ways to make yourself more creative consistently. There are alot of great ideas on my resource page.
This just goes to show what can happen when you looks at something in a totally different way. Take a totally mundane task, like unrolling a roll of sticky tape and try to find something different about it. Now, the challenge becomes one of harnessing the energies available in this process.
X-ray photography would be an obvious use of this phenomenon. What’s a second use for x-rays?
InnovationLabs has published a white paper on innovation metrics. While intriguing in its breadth, I’m not totally sold on the proposed metrics contained therein. Too many of these metrics can be “padded” so that when it comes times to performance reviews people will be rushing to fill their quotas of “customers seen” or “ideas generated” just so they can claim they’re innovative.
Many of the other metrics are based upon “what was done”, or “what was the return on x project”. While necessary to somehow measure, these types of metrics lag and are like reacting to a fever of 105F after the person’s fever dropped to room temperature becaue he/she cooked.
Take a look at the above picture. Which one is designed less than optimally? It’s actually ironic. There are three different approaches to optimizing the water pouring experience. However, one product doesn’t do the best job of addressing what happens before the bottle reaches the consumer. Think about it.
You take your bottle of water off the shelf and bring it to the register. You place it on the belt and the cashier scans the bottles price. It doesn’t scan.
She tries again.
No dice. She turns the bottle on the side and it finally scans.
The center bottle of Ice Mountain has its barcode above the level of the scanner.
Bar Code Is Above The Level of Most Scanners
A quick rendering (below) of the alternative shows that it looks pretty good. Reading the lettering is harder in the mountains. My guess (and no offense to Marketing) is that the decision to have the bar code higher was largely an aesthetic decision. A creative and very cool, grippable bottle makes a sacrifice in design that the folks at the cash register have to pay for.
Great interview over at Innovation Zen. Roger is another one of my favorite creative types. One of my favorite points that Roger makes is that when coming up with an idea, take that second or third thought that comes up as opposed to the first one that pops into your head.
The first idea is very often the most obvious and the one everyone else has thought of. It’s the others that are buried a little that really come forth from your individual experiences and strengths. Those are the unique and stellar ideas!
Interesting article here. It seems everyone is looking for a magic bullet in innovation.
It’s right there in front of you–in fact– it IS you!
Humans are inherently creative and they are always looking for ways to make their jobs easier and more productive. Do the following and GROW!™ You’ll be creating/supporting a culture of innovation without needing a program.
Get out of the way!! Don’t let your ego get in the way. Let people be people and don’t stifle their need to improvise and come up with solutions!
Reward Risk taking and innovative thinking. Nothing helps innovation like knowing that someone has “got your back”
Obstacle removal. You’re trying to do everything at breakneck speed-get the obstacles to success out of the way so you don’t trip! What are the obstacles? Ask your people.
Work and win! Nothing spurs innovation like confronting the problems of the day. Work hard and innovation will percolate.
The same rules apply to individuals as well- apply the acronym to yourself and watch the ideas flow!
Kudo’s to Honda for leveraging their Asimo technology and adapting it to direct human application! Show’s again how utilizing an existing technology and simply tweaking it can result in a radically new and exciting device. From the Google Press Release:
The 6.5 kilogramme (14.3-pound) device — consisting of a saddle, leg-like frames and shoes — can reduce the load on users’ legs while walking or climbing and descending stairs by supporting bodyweight, Honda said.
Honda said the motor-powered machine is still at an experimental stage, but elderly people and people undergoing rehabilitation who need support for their leg muscles and joints are the main target.
The device is also expected to help assembly workers to keep a crouching position, Honda said, adding that it plans to test the device at one of its factories north of Tokyo.
Just goes to show that it’s not about being “outside the box” per se, but more like bringing the contents of two boxes into a room and dumping the contents of both on the table!
I saw this blurb today and it got me thinking about applying it to creativity and brainstorming.
Next time you are trying to come up with the solution to a problem, form an advisory panel made up of you in the present, you in the past, and you in the future. Imagine how each person would solve the problem at hand. Use the crazy “naive” ideas of youth to create other ideas. Use the future self to give you glimpses into solving the solution from the the future’s perspective.
Of course don’t forget to brainstorm in the present!
A key aspect to keeping a creative edge is to challenge your mind with new creative experiences. One way of doing this is to compose a poem that strictly adheres to rules of construction. Free-form poetry is not what we are talking about here. We want structure for purposes of this exercise. One such literary form is the Haiku - poems that are structured 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables. Traditionally haiku are about nature, but for keeping our brains finely tuned for creativity, we can compose them about anything.
Before composing your daily haiku look at something as opposed to just letting visual stimulation hit your eyes. Really look at something. Let your mind run wild with metaphor for what you see. Pick some aspect of what you see and use that as the focal point of your haiku.
Remember, it’s 5-7-5. Try to have the last line summarize the first two lines.
It’s been my experience that with only a couple daily doses of haiku you’ll find yourself composing them quicker and more of them! The best news is that they get better and more profound. I look forward to hearing of your experiences with this!
Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1991). Productivity loss in idea-generating groups: tracking down the blocking effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 392-403.
Mullen, B., Johnson, C., & Salas, E. (1991). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: a meta-analytic integration.Basic and Applied Social Psychology. 12, 3-23.
A perusal of any of the above peer-reviewed articles (and there are many more where those came from!) shows that there are some serious problems with traditional brainstorming sessions. You know the type. We’ve all been a part of those pull-multiple-people-into-a-room-for-hours-if-not-days-at-a-time-to-come-up-with-ideas meetings.
The main issues with these types of meetings are:
Producton Blocking (People need to take turns to express ideas. Yes, this is a problem and it is the biggie!)
Social Matching (the lowest producing member of the group sets the pace for the meeting - believe it or not!)
Evaluation Apprehension (fear of judgement - shy team members are especially sensitive to this)
Free Riding (Individuals can’t really be held accountable in brainstormings so not everyone contributes. It is an issue but very minor.)
Yet, in spite of the issues with brainstormings they continue to be done,most likely because most people never realized that brainstormings were inefficient in the first place.
Before I mention how we can improve our brainstormings, I’m sure many will say, ” Hey, we got the multi-million dollar idea out of a brainstorming!” To which I’ll respond, “How many more multi-million dollar ideas never even made it out into the open because of the inherent inefficiencies with brainstorming?”
Think about it…
Can any of us afford to not benefit from the creativity of every individual to the utmost?
So…how do we make brainstormings work again?
The first way is to only use two people. It seems that the above problems are minimized when only two people brainstorm with each other. Apparently there is something to be said for “bouncing ideas of someone.” But when you only have two people, then you lose the effect of having more brains working on a problem.
The second is to go the ZenStorming route. This method essentially permits everyone to create ideas simultaneously without fear of repercussion while also building upon each others’ ideas. No fear of repercussions, no long meetings, and more quality ideas than you’ll know what to do with.
When looking for solutions it is often extremely helpful to look at other technologies that are similar. Sweet peppers, nuts and diamonds actually share something in common. Similar techniques are used on all of them to break them apart.
Sweet Peppers: They are placed in a pressure tight container and the pressure is raised causing micro fractures near the stem and the air to infiltrate the pepper. The pressure is suddenly dropped in the tank and the tops of the peppers explode off carrying the seeds with them!
Nuts: They are placed in a pressure cooker, the water pressure is increased, and the pressurized water seeps through micro-cracks into the seeds. The pressure is dropped and shells explode! Instant shell removal!
Diamonds: Imperfect diamonds are placed in an airtight vessel and the pressure increased. Air gets into tiny imperfections, the pressure is dropped and…yup, you guessed it, the crystals break apart.
The patent for blowing apart the peppers was issued in 1968. The nut process in 1986 in Japan. The diamond process years after that.
Think of all the time wasted between innovations. If someone was astute enough to see similarities to other processes, these ideas would have occurred much quicker.
The lessons?
Keep your eyes and ears open - be attentive to the world around you!
THINK ABSTRACTION! Look at the fundamental concept beneath the problem.
Read and don’t be afraid to look outside your area of expertise. Patents are great source of creative information. Could be that someone else may have already solved your problem.
Also look at tools such as TRIZ. They can be helpful at arriving at solutions through categorization of abstract physical processes.
Creativity is not something that is passed on to some people but not others. All people by nature are creative. That means that if you’re reading this, or even understanding it because someone else is communicating this to you via voice or sign, you are a creative being!
“If I’m creative,” you say, “why don’t I come up with brilliant ideas?”
First, every day you are conceiving new ideas and using them to get through your day efficiently. It’s just that they’re not high profile ideas in the world of corporate America. That’s ok! You’re still being creative!
Second, if you think you’re not creative, or even questioning the fact you’re creative, you are breaking the link to your Creative origins and your creativity will falter.
I invite you to go for a walk in the woods, or somewhere in nature. Pay attention to that little corner of the Cosmos you find yourself in. Absorb and soak up the experience of being a human in nature. You are not outside of this unfolding dynamic drama that started with a bang millions of years of ago. You are a part of it!! A conscious part of it!
Cultures spanning the globe have referred to this universe as Creation - it is a reflection of Creativity. As we live and love, we build upon and within Creation, we co-create and even pro-create. As the universe unfolds in its splendor, we contribute to this unfolding! If that isn’t being creative then I don’t know what is!
So stop doubting that you’re creative. Accept it as your nature! Rejoice in it! Then share it and your family, neighborhood, country, world, and universe will be better for it.
This article from FastCompany is amazing and eye opening. Copy it and post it on your bulletin board at work! Okay, maybe just bring it in to your boss or team and discuss it. What are your thoughts on this?
It doesn’t surprise me that Corporate off-site meetings might not be as effective as once thought. Not surprisingly, it’s new stimuli that seem to help idea generation.
What are your thoughts on thinking?
Speaking of idea generation, I’ve added a new Excel based creativity tool called the Lotus Blossom (right click to download). Please try it and let me know if you like it or if there are problems with it. More tools on the way!
The article highlights various ways in which companies’ cultures (which are largely due to management) are not conducive to creativity.
Personally, some of the lack of rewarding the innovation process is largely due to the fact that few companies have metrics to measure what’s been done correctly during the innovation process. Standard performance metrics do not touch on things like usability of discoveries for other business units, patent landscape development, etc.
The article proposed the model of the music producer as a model for creativity management. I think it’s a great idea and should be looked at.
One way to spur your creativity is to try and link dissimilar topics. So, since we are in the midst of the baseball playoffs (Go White Sox!), I thought, what’s better than writing about something that links baseball and creativity. So I got to thinking…
No doubt there are times in baseball where players use creativity in getting an out or in hitting and running. Yet, it dawned on me that there is one place where very little creativity is used and yet it’s an area where it could have huge returns.
The line-up.
Yes, there is precious little creativity used in placing the nine men at various slots in the lineup.
“How’s that, Plish?”
If strictly talking numbers, say a team only had nine players that were bonafide starters counting the DH (I’m talking the American League here). That means there are 9! (nine factorial) ways that lineup can be put together. That’s 362,880 different ways of putting together a lineup! Now, say the team has 12 bonafide starters from which to pick from, that number balloons to 79,833,600 combinations! If there are 14 then the number goes to 726,485,760!! Just for fun, if all 25 players (this means including pitchers) could be picked from to make the starting lineup, the number of possible permutations is: 741,354,768,000!
Now going back to the more realistic lineups. How many different lineups would you say most managers use during the course of a season? I don’t know, but I would venture to guess that at the most teams use maybe 40 lineups during the course of a season – and that’s with injuries. (Actually, even if they used different lineups for every game that would be a whole 0.45% of the permutations used in the best case scenario!)
I know, I know. Technically, according to baseball traditions, certain guys bat lead off because they’re fast, and other guys bat fourth because they’re sluggers, and the not so great guys bat near the end, and others bat at a certain place because they freak out if they don’t.
But still. There are somewhere between 362,880 and 726,485,760 different combinations and baseball managers don’t even scratch the surface with the various permutations. After all, how do they know for sure that some other permutation might not be magnitudes better? The only time a lineup really matters is in the first inning, and maybe the second. After that the “leadoff” guy may not lead-off for the rest of the game, and the clean-up guy (the guy batting fourth) may never come up with men on base.
So what do you think? How well do you stack up compared to Baseball managers and are they really lacking in creativity with regards to lineups?
This is my first video blog on creativity. What are your thoughts? (You can actually add comments on the video itself by clicking on the plus sign on the moving indicator of the time in the video)
I have seen industry violate one or more of the above ways time and time again. It is difficult in most of today’s corporate cultures to reward risk because risk is often tied directly into the pending rewards that have already been dialed-in to short term and often long term plans. This means that failure, which should be embraced and learned from in an entrepreneurial company, becomes the enemy and people get various levels of punishment instead of reward for creative thinking. How have you seen these followed or violated?
Physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) is the father of Quantum theory as he theorized that the electrons of an atom were in various shells of energy and they didn’t emit radiation unless they changed energy states- they jumped to another orbit level. This Nobel Prize winner was once said:
“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”
Bohr hits on two interesting points here.
1. The language of poetry. Poetry is…well…poetic. Its genius lies in being able to describe something with a wholistic precision when the language used is often less than precise. Sounds paradoxical but that’s the genius of it. That leads to point 2.
2. Poetic language creates images - and often many of them. The words of poetry show us, almost in a simultaneous fashion, all the facets of a crystal at once, with all their perspectives in tact.
When your stuck and can’t think of anything, use crazy ideas to get the ball rolling, and try using poetry to describe your problem. Let the poetry lead to images and from the images, connect them together, shuffle them around to concretize your ideas.
What do you think about Bohr’s statement and its implications to creative thinking?
This video/product is amazing. As a musician I began drooling (Ok not real drool, but figurative drool). There are soo many applications for this. I really love the following paradoxical statement the inventor said in this video:
“For theoretical reasons I thought it would be impossible. But the more I pondered the subject, the more I began to see that what doesn’t work in theory, can still work in reality.”
Great reminder from the Daily OM. This little piece reflects on falling in love with one’s self, and consequently seeing the wonder and joy each one of us is. The truth here is that if we see ourselves with wide open eyes and wonder, we will be much more open to the ideas we generate and we’ll enjoy being creative!
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. -Niels Bohr
In Bohr’s mind, the paradox was an essential part of coming up with solutions to problems. This point cannot be overstressed. Paradox is the nursery from which the most brilliant ideas come forth. When we are confronted with a problem is which increasing “A” decreases “B” and yet we need A and B to both increase, we are forced with having to redefine the problem and find solutions outside the way we’ve been thinking.
Einstein once said,
”You can never solve a problem on the level it was created.”
This goes hand in hand with Bohr’s statement. Where do you see problems that are seemingly insurmountable? Look beyond the origins of the problem, into the paradoxes present, and then you’ll truly start seeing solutions.
One way of stimulating new ideas is to visit websites like Trendhunter or Trendwatching. These sites are comprised of copious amounts of information as to what is considered hot and, in some ways, what is not.
Simply visit these sites, look at the pictures of the trends and use them as a springboard to new ideas. It’s even more powerful when the trends are combined!
One way to come up with new ideas for products, or to just think creatively, is to look at existing products and see what can be done to improve them.
I had just worked on my car and and went in to wash my hands. With slightly oil soaked hands I went to the bathroom to wash up. I quickly plunged a dollop of my favorite Method™ soap into my palm. Method™ soaps are cool, pure and simple. They smell great while not being too feminine for a man and the packaging is hip with a splash of fun thrown in.
I was disappointed then when an obvious flaw in the product became apparent. Before I mention it, take a look at the pic and tell me if you can see what the issue is (It’s the soap on the left).
Where is the madness in the Method(TM)?
Guess it?
The problem is the cool logo on the top of the bottle. It’s raised ever so slightly. When a dirty hand is placed on top of the bottle, dirt gets packed into the edges of the raised logo. In a twist of irony, while the soap got my hands clean (and it DID do a great job), the bottle top got dirty and the raised edges of the logo made it extremely difficult to clean. I had to scrub the soap bottle dispenser with soap to clean it. That’s not cool.
I put an empty bottle from another company for comparison in the pic. If the top gets dirty on that one, what do I do? Wipe it and it’s done. Two seconds of work.
A key to being creative is to keep your eyes open for ways of improving things. What would you do to this bottle to keep the coolness factor but make it easier to clean?
If you haven’t checked it out before, there some really inspirational and informational videos over at TED.
It’s a great resource for creative and challenging thought. So stroll on over and check out the video presentations, and if you’re feeling adventurous, become a TED member-it’s free.
I had the pleasure and honor to interview Creativity Expert, Michael Michalko. Michalko is one of the most highly acclaimed creativity experts in the world and author of the best sellers Thinkertoys (A Handbook of Business Creativity), ThinkPak (A Brainstorming Card Deck), and Cracking Creativity (The Secrets Of Creative Genius). His web-page is http://www.creativethinking.net . I hope you enjoy this first interview of the series , Creative Gems. - Michael Plishka
(Plishka) In your experience, what is the most common obstacle to creative thinking?
(Michalko)The dominant factor in the way our minds work is the buildup of patterns that enable us to simplify the assimilation of complex data. These patterns are based on our reproducing our past experiences in life, education, and work that have been successful in the past. We look at 6 X 6 and 36 appears automatically without conscious thought. We examine a new product for our company and know it is a good design at an appropriate price. We look at a business plan and know that the financial projections are not good. These things we do routinely, because our thinking patterns give us precision as we perform repetitive tasks, such as driving an automobile or doing our job. - Click here to keep reading!>
I was surfing over at oddmusic and I am amazed at some of the instruments that have been invented!
The Hank Drum and its derivatives are really slick! I personally use a cool wire mesh garbage can for some interesing sounds.
Flip Over to Make Drum
So the creativity exercise for today is to play with a musical instrument, or design a new instrument. Who knows, you might be creating a tool that will increase creativity!
There is an amazing optical illusion here that is worth checking out.
There’s a great lesson here to be learned in perspective and how looking at things in multiple ways yields new information. Try training yourself to look at this in multiple ways. I did it, you can too!
I came across this website for Innocentive. You are able to look at various problems and then propose solutions to which you can receive money in return.
You will be bound by confidentiality issues with this so it can stay on the up and up. It’s a great way to polish your problem solving skills and maybe make a few bucks in the meantime.
Researchers have shown that people speak learned foreign languages better after a couple of drinks. The reason is that people aren’t as critical of themselves and they aren’t afraid to make mistakes. So, the kicker is–they don’t. They speak more fluently.
There’s a reason why people brainstorm over a couple of drinks. A drink or two suspends judgement of ideas. It’s not that the ideas are necessarily more creative, it is that the ideas are allowed out into the open where they can percolate and cross-pollinate. Trust your ideas, trust yourself.
So next time, have a glass of wine if you find yourself needing ideas. Not too much, there is a point of diminishing returns…
There’s much discussion over innovation metrics. This article here discusses the overall trends in measuring innovation, but quite frankly I’m disappointed in them (that’s why I’m working on an article now that redefines how innovation should be measured). This Blogger wasn’t too keen on the results either. What are your thoughts?
There are common perceptions that innovative, creative products have to be thought up out of thin air. On the contrary, great inventions are often the result of combining products or technologies in new and innovative ways. A perfect example of this is ForHealth Technologies’, Intellifill IV. This system, designed to minimize medication errors, leverages the combination of several tried and true technologies. The result is a cool, slick, innovative product that is poised to make some serious waves in the world of medication error prevention by saving money, and saving lives.
According to their website, the device is poised to deliver:
Reductions in medication errors
Deployment of pharmacy and nurse skill sets to more patient-focused activities
Significant medication-acquisition cost savings
Reduction in medication inventories
This type of innovation underscores the need to become comfortable with technologies from different fields and understanding their nuances. Only then can they be combined in a new and elegant ways.
Will President-Elect Obama Stay True to Science Funding Promises?
President Elect Obama’s science policies can be read here. While there is an exciting desire to double investments in research over 10 years, I wonder how much of that will transpire given the current economic environment. His acceptance speech seemed to leave an ‘out’ regarding the difficulty of getting everything done that he wants to in these trying times. One can only hope that science gets an improved shake in the new administration.
