Editor's note: Jerry W. Thomas is president and CEO of Decision Analyst Inc., an Arlington, Texas, research company. He can be reached at jthomas@decisionanalyst.com. This article appeared in the October 10, 2011, edition of Quirk's e-newsletter.

Every change in the marketplace, every upheaval in the economy, every shift in technology and every change in consumer attitudes and outlook creates opportunities for successful new products. Since these changes are amplified during tough times, new product opportunities are actually more numerous during economic turbulence. Companies that develop and deploy new products during economic downturns tend to outperform their more timid rivals during the recession and come sprinting out of the gates when the economy begins to expand.
 
One way to keep new products flowing to market during tough times is to rely on "hyper-creatives.'' These are people in the target market who are exceptionally creative in coming up with new product ideas. These individuals can generate many more new product ideas than the average person and the quality of their ideas far exceeds the output of their noncreative counterparts - this ability is called idea-centric creativity.

Inherent obstacles

Hyper-creatives are particularly valuable now because it is quite common for companies to cut or defer new product development when the economy is weak. But even during the best of times companies struggle with inherent obstacles that undermine their new product development efforts:
 
Groupthink. We are all copycats. We all think we are original and creative when we are only thinking what our peers have ordained as true or acceptable. Conventional wisdom is just that: conventional.
 
Targeting error. If you were permitted to review the marketing plans of the top 100 brands in the U.S., you would think that most people in the U.S. die by the age of 35, or certainly by 50. Why are older consumers ignored? How many new product opportunities are overlooked?
 
Lack of customer knowledge. The annual reports of Fortune 500 companies and the speeches of their executives suggest that these companies spend massively on marketing research and know every detail about their markets, customers and prospects. Sadly, the truth is that most companies do not really understand their customers or prospective customers because they don't do their research homework - or don't do it well.
 
Complexity. Large companies employ many extraordinarily smart people, many with advanced degrees from the best-known universities where they have learned the value of complexity and complex thinking. This initial training continues as they graduate and move into large corporations, where complexity is often the currency of advancement. The more complexity one can offer, the smarter that person is perceived to be - and the more qualified for promotion. Complexity is another name for confusion and diffusion (both barriers to new product development).
 
Lack of empathy. Corporate decision makers tend to be out of touch with their target audiences. These executives tend to be better educated, higher in income and isolated in upscale neighborhoods, with very different lifestyles than the average man on the street. It's often difficult for these executives to relate to and understand the common consumers who make up their target markets.
 
Too many cooks. Large companies are made up of many ambitious individuals and fiefdoms, all competing for attention, power and influence. New product ideas tend to get torn to pieces by this internal competition. New product efforts, particularly during the formative stages, must be tightly controlled by a very small group to have much chance of success.

Make it very difficult

These commonplace barriers, combined with budget cuts, often make it very difficult for companies to develop new products during economic adversity. This is where hyper-creative consumers can be especially beneficial.
 
Creativity alone, however, is not enough. Hyper-creatives must also have relevant product category experience. If you are trying to develop a new toy, you want to find hyper-creatives who have children in their lives - not only parents but grandparents, aunts and uncles. Their personal experiences with the product category - and their households' experiences - will implicitly guide the ideation process. These experiences will also help ensure that the product ideas are relevant to the target market.
 
One more thing is important in tough economic times. The hyper-creatives selected for new product ideation must be on the front lines, in the trenches, personally experiencing the recession and its effects. That is, the hyper-creatives selected for new product ideation must be aware of - and sensitive to - the changes and shifts caused by the economic downturn.
 
Profiling hyper-creatives
 
Who are these hyper-creative individuals? You can't spot them on the street. They look like everyone else, dress like everyone else and talk like everyone else but they are unique in two special ways. When charged with the task of coming up with new product ideas they will produce many more ideas than the average person and the originality will be exceptional.
 
We have tested more than 200,000 consumers over the past decade for idea-centric creativity and here is what we have learned.
 
If you ask people directly if they are creative, a large majority of the adult population in the U.S. classify themselves as "very creative and imaginative,'' but our testing indicates that less than 4 percent of the population falls into this hyper-creative category. Younger people tend to be more creative than older people but, surprisingly, the fall-off in idea-centric creativity as people age tends to be minimal until the age of 54, after which "creativity decay'' appears to accelerate (Table 1).

While idea-centric creativity declines with age, there are still many older consumers (ages 55+) who retain high levels of idea-centric creativity.
 
Education tends to positively correlate with exceptional creativity (Table 2). That is, educational achievement tends to be predictive of idea-centric creativity.


 
This correlation between educational attainment and idea-centric creativity suggests that achievement in school helps develop creativity or at least helps to identify creativity. Since younger people tend to be better educated than older people in the U.S., part of this education effect is related to youthfulness rather than the benefits of education. However, our testing over the years has identified many hyper-creatives with little formal education.
 
Gender appears to be a poor predictor of idea-centric creativity. Men and women are roughly equal in creativity (when scores are adjusted for education and age differences), although each sex does better in generating new product ideas in product categories where their interests and relevant experiences are concentrated.
 
Ethnicity is a poor predictor of exceptional creativity (when adjusted by age and education). Minorities, on average, tend to be as creative as the Caucasian majority. Other types of creativity (i.e., artistic, musical, literary and theatrical) are only weakly predictive of idea-centric creativity. No matter how the regression techniques were manipulated, other types of creativity (alone or in combination) never showed up as major variables in predicting idea-centric creativity.
 
Geography is also not predictive of idea-centric creativity. Hyper-creatives live all over the U.S., in large urban areas, in small towns and in rural areas. Hyper-creatives also live in Europe, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.
 
Hyper-creatives and ideation
 
What is the best way to use these creative individuals to generate new product ideas? First, creativity does not take place in a vacuum. New product creation demands starting points and focal points. Creativity must have rails to run on, a purpose and a destination. Client involvement is critical to the success of a new products project because clients are the experts on their companies' goals, technical capabilities, risk tolerances, marketing strengths and budget capacities. Clients' knowledge and understanding, as well as their feedback along the way, create the guidelines and context that help ensure the successful outcome of a new product ideation project.
 
Once the new product development goals are fully understood, these goals are translated into starting points for the ideation process. Ideation sessions can be conducted in person (all-day group sessions with eight-to-10 hyper-creatives and facilitators) or online with a larger number of hyper-creatives.
 
In-person ideation
 
In-person sessions are usually led by two innovation facilitators who take the hyper-creative participants through a carefully-selected series of fast-moving, high-energy creative exercises focused on the project's goals. A typical session lasts from 9 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m. Client observation of these sessions is extremely valuable. During the lunch break, clients meet with the facilitators to discuss the morning session and select new product ideas (or new starting points) to build upon in the afternoon session. The group interaction and creative exercises are stimulants to hundreds of new ideas or idea fragments and the client's involvement helps guide and augment the creative process.
 
Online ideation
 
Online sessions involve a larger number of hyper-creatives, usually 20 or more, and take place over a period of seven-to-10 days. One advantage of the online session is the power of more minds. A second advantage of online ideation is the power of time. As these imaginative consumers think about a product category over a period of days, more and more ideas come to mind. Like in-person sessions, online sessions are fueled by a series of creativity exercises organized around the objectives of the project and client involvement in the process is essential to success. The outcome is hundreds and hundreds of relevant new product ideas and idea fragments.
 
New product concepts
 
But the real work has just started. The hundreds of raw product ideas and idea fragments must be sorted through, analyzed, melded with other ideas and checked against the client's development objectives and constraints. Typically, an innovation team mines the raw ideas and idea fragments, identifies the better ideas and then shapes them into fully-developed, integrated first-stage concepts. A first-stage concept consists of a rough copy and perhaps a rough illustration. At this point, perhaps 20 to 30 first-stage concepts might be created.
 
Then it's time for the first-stage concept review with the client. Based on client feedback, 10-to-15 of the better first-stage concepts are identified for final development. These concepts then go through an online qualitative communication check to ensure they are fully understood by target consumers. Based on consumer feedback, the concepts are edited and the artwork is refined. Then the final, test-ready concepts are presented to the client for final review.
 
At that point, the client has new product concepts that communicate as intended and is ready for concept screening and concept testing. If the number of concepts is large, the screening step is always recommended to identify the stronger concepts. Then the best new product concepts go through a final monadic concept test to quantify the market potential represented by the new product idea. Concepts with high potential then become the focus of R&D efforts to deliver a product that lives up to the concept's promise.

Sounds of opportunity

Recessions create many new product opportunities. Hyper-creatives who are experiencing the economic downturn have more sensitive ears than the rest of us and can hear the faint sounds of opportunity's faraway tapping.