JEFFREY BAUMGARTNER
Jeffrey Baumgartner is the author of the book The Way of the Innovation Master, and is the author/editor of Report 103, a newsletter on creativity and innovation in business. He is currently developing and running workshops around the world on Anticonventional Thinking, a new approach to achieving goals through creativity.
Status quo bias is a proven cognitive bias that exists in all normal people. Innovation, especially breakthrough innovation, requires veering from the status quo. As a result, the average managers is all too likely not to approve a highly innovative idea, not because of any intrinsic flaw in the idea, but because the idea would require change. You need to work around this bias if you truly want your company to innovate.
Big, crazy, breakthrough ideas seem wonderful when you are dreaming them up, but frightening when it comes time to implement them. Fortunately, the field personal development has a technique that you can apply: personal development planning (PDP). Jeffrey Baumgartner explains how to implement this approach to your innovation process.
Are you looking to hire creative employees at your company? If so, allow me to propose some characteristics you can advertise for and look for in order to find true creative thinkers. However, I also have a warning for you. But first, a little background.
What makes a company innovative? Innovation is nothing more than a tool that enables companies to achieve unique, strategic goals. It should not simply be a slogan, nor an end unto itself, argues Jeffrey Baumgartner. To be truly innovative, an organization should have seven essential characteristics.
You have doubtless heard of the fuzzy front end of innovation. It is another name for idea generation. But Jeffrey Baumgartner believes that the back end of innovation, where implementation is supposed to take place, is just as fuzzy. Many companies lack clear, efficient processes for implementing the ideas they generate.
Frequently, brainstorms, idea campaigns and similar idea extravaganzas end with a vague notion of choosing the best idea. The problem here is that a truly creative idea, the kind of idea that has the potential to become a breakthrough innovation is seldom the best solution to the problem or the best path to achieving a goal - for the very simple reason that highly creative ideas are original. They cannot directly be compared to existing notions, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner.
If you want to be innovative, you need to be a leader. No individual or organization has become an innovative one by copying the actions of their competitors or peers. That may seem obvious, but evidence shows that most people fail to realize this critical fact.
Business, governments and individuals can easily become bogged down by procedures and processes that harm efficiency and kill innovation. The obvious solution is to start from scratch. Here's how to do it, according to Jeffrey Baumgartner.
Anticonventional thinking forces out of our normal pathways of creative problem solving to consider a wider range of potential solutions. Jeffrey Baumgartner explains how it works via a simple example.
When it comes to creative problem solving, which is more effective? Focusing on the problem at hand, or on setting goals for what we'd like to accomplish? Jeffrey Baumgartner explores this perplexing question and comes to a very clear conclusion.
With the growing popularity of open innovation, crowdsourcing and web-based suggestion schemes where the best ideas are decided by popular votes, many of us tend to forget a very simply truism: creative people do not follow the crowd. At minimum, they do their own thing. At best, they lead the crowd.
What's the most effective way to design an idea competition that doesn't just result in a huge pile of ideas, but enables teams to implement ideas that will help to make your organization more creative? Jeffrey Baumgartner shares one practical framework for making this happen.
When we are trying to generate ideas in order to solve a problem, whether through anticonventional thinking, brainstorming or another method, we typically distance ourself slightly from the problem. We look for ideas on how to improve our company’s product, how to deliver better customer service, how to cut costs or alternative business models. In all of these cases, we separate ourselves from the problem and, by so doing, we potentially limit our understanding of the problem. Why not take a different approach and become the problem?
Many managers are very good at working out the cost of implementing an idea. But they often completely fail to calculate the cost of NOT implementing it. This may sometimes be far more expensive than implementing it, especially over the long term, warns Jeffrey Baumgartner.
If you want creative ideas, you need to invest your creative energy not in ideas, but in understanding the problem and formulating provocative challenges, instructs Jeffrey Baumgartner.
