Editor’s note: David Rauch is senior vice president of RTI market Research and Brand Strategy, Norwalk, Conn.
The quest for creative breakthroughs and deeper insights is evident at every level of business across the globe seemingly every day. Truly innovative insight has become the new Holy Grail of business growth.
The quest too often leaves people feeling frustrated and boxed-in. These mundane realities remind us of a familiar old adage: If every problem is seen as a nail, then every solution will be a hammer! That notion rings true in today’s fever-pitched creative renaissance.
A veritable gold mine of promised insights surrounds us. If only we had the right algorithms, the right out of the box thinking to magically unlock the secrets to the next innovation, the next marketing breakthrough.
Thinking outside of the box seems to be the new mantra for achieving creative innovation. What we are finding is that there is nothing mystical about finding the way to think outside of the box – to see well beyond what is in front of us to innovations that will be successful in the real marketplace. Yes, imagination is a must but imagination alone won’t be enough!
There are three qualities often missing from innovation-tasked teams that, when present, really can pay off:
Team diversity
To significantly elevate the likelihood of surfacing the outside-of-the-box ideas, it is important to move beyond traditional team brainstorming to teams of thinkers from diverse fields of experience and expertise.
The good news is that there is an increasing recognition of the essential truth about problem solving that Albert Einstein recognized more than 75 years ago: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Many business teams and managers are energetically seeking new creative thinking beyond the box in an effort to uncover pathways to new opportunities. A growing number of enterprises and organizations are realizing that having diversity in thinking as well as problem solvers can have a dramatic, positive impact on creative solutions and innovative insights.
Quoting investigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christianson, author of 100 Diagrams That Changed the World, “Most noteworthy of all is … the awareness that everything builds on what came before, that creativity is combinatorial and that the most radical innovations harness the cross-pollination of disciplines.”
As noted by V. Krishna Kumar, a professor of psychology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, problem solving can be dramatically enhanced by utilizing the “broadcast search” problem-solving approach. This approach makes the problem information available to people from diversified fields. Experience has shown the more removed the problem is from the solver’s area of expertise, the greater the odds that the problem was solved.
Workforces or teams philosophically committed to the inclusion of a broad diversity of thinkers are far more likely to interact and produce innovative solutions. The cross-pollination and the hybridization of ideas are fundamental to successful outcomes. Reach beyond the enterprise to educators, scientists, artists, authors, consumers, entertainers, entrepreneurs, etc.
Independent thinking
Diversity alone is insufficient. To foster innovative ideation, innovation teams must be able to explore solutions in a speak-up culture that encourages rather than inhibits the full creative capability of each team participant or employee.
In order for an idea to be developed and brought to market, key decision makers from across the organization must be receptive of new ideas.
Brain power
In addition to a diversity of independent thought, breakthrough ideation teams need to be powered by the fertile minds of genius-level, polymath thinkers. Not all team members need to be geniuses but breakthrough ideas are considerably more likely when there are high IQ thinkers playing an active role.
Remember, ingenuity matters. Plan to recruit/include at least some genius-level thinkers from diversified fields. As team members, high IQ participants have the imagination to provide vitally needed doses of truly outside the box insight.
Encourage openness and independent thinking. Innovation teams thrive when they are able to tap into their imaginations in a free and unencumbered way. At the same time, teams that are supportive of the ideas of other team members are more prone to have aha insights.
I think it’s probably summed up best by Steve Jobs. He led Apple through a series of innovations that outdistanced IBM, which at the time had a larger research and development (R&D) budget. Jobs had great clarity of understanding of what makes an innovation process successful: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led and how much you get it.”