Success in product and service innovation depends on creativity as a key input. Creativity in business is ‘the thinking of novel and appropriate ideas’. Without a healthy and continuing supply of ideas, most businesses would cease to exist. At the height of the digital revolution Sony produced 1000 new products a year (that's 4 every day). Fundamental challenges facing leaders in the 21st Century are how to encourage 'inventive search' in a busy environment and convert invention into innovation.
Human Dynamics can help in the following areas:
- Running 'blue sky' workshops to explore new ideas
- Assessing your current creative capabilities, climate and culture with a view to developing strengths and minimising weaknesses
- Designing your company to release more and better creative ideas
- Developing your people's capacity and confidence to think creatively
- Providing a toolkit of methods and approaches for encouraging personal and team-based creativity
- Professional problem solving, especially for complex, and intractable problems
- Facilitating strategic decision making processes so that options are fully considered before reaching a conclusion
Case Study:
Practical Creativity
Situation
Our client is a major pharmaceutical company that needs to leverage the full brainpower of its employees if it is to realise its ambitions.
The challenge
Many science based organizations over-emphasise logic as the predominant thinking and operating style. We designed a programme to develop the capacity and willpower to use unconventional thinking when this is of value. They also wanted to legitimise creative thinking in unpromising environments where untried ideas are fragile.
What we did
We designed a bespoke development programme, phased over 3 months, using real world projects as source materials to maximise the relevance to participants. Attendees are able to:
- Creatively analyse problems and opportunities, so that they can 'see the wood and the trees' and separate the critical issues from the background
- Use a menu of methods for systematic creative thinking and creative problem solving for use explicitly with others or in a 'guerrilla' fashion, when the climate is less accepting of overt creative thinking methods
- Encourage creative thought and action in others, by setting a positive example of the required values and behaviours
- Implement a real life project that requires the use of creative thinking and creative problem solving
The result
The programme has delivered a number of tangible business improvement benefits, for example:
- A costing review was conducted with internal and external suppliers, which identified major areas for cost savings and other efficiency improvements
- Alignment of wants and needs between Directors of a number of divisions over the specification for a major IT capital decision where previously there had been politics and indecision
- A major debt recovery exercise in an area which was previously a political 'no-go' area, resulting in savings of £18 M for one division
