How the creative stay creative
The title suggests these tips are just for those folks working within design consultancies and innovation labs, but the creative techniques in this Inc. magazine article are applicable to any group looking to stimulate creative thought. To some, these approaches might appear a bit bonkers, but essentially they boil down to tested themes: applying multiple perspectives to a problem; providing the time and space to explore wild ideas; encouraging risk; and hiring and rewarding smart, passionate people. The word “process” is mentioned once, and only in relation to lack of process. But aren’t these creative approaches processes in themselves?
Related link: frog Design Mind
July 20th, 2008 at 7:38 am
You’re absolutely right! InnovationLabs (http://www.innovationlabs.com – mentioned in the article) uses a facilitated collaborative design process to engage stakeholders in solving complex problems as well as creating new products or services. Within our team we consider the process we use with these groups to be a design process.
We employ this kind of process for cross-functional and multi-disciplinary teams whether it’s an internal group or a situation where the participants represent many organizations (multi-stakeholder cross-industry groups). In addition to the ‘tested themes’ you mention (applying multiple perspectives to a problem; providing the time and space to explore wild ideas; and encouraging risk) we also use a process that is: iterative, uses parallel processing to explore many aspects of the ‘issue’ simultaneously, develops alternative ‘scenarios,’ and supports rapid prototyping.