LECTURE 3 – MOOC
Defining creativity
Creativity = the process of coming up with new ideas, is the first step in the broader innovation
process.
It is an important way of responding to changing customer needs and staying ahead of the
competition.
Characteristics of creativity
1. Novelty
Novelty refers to the extent to which an idea is rare or unique.
Novelty can also be measured by fluency of idea generation. That is, the number of ideas that are
generated, and by flexibility, which is the range of unique categories covered across ideas.
2. Usefulness
Usefulness refers to whether an idea is valuable.
Is it effective? Is it worthwhile for a significant group of customers? Can it be commercialized
successfully? Usefulness also includes feasibility. Is the idea practical? Can it be implemented given
other considerations, like material and financial considerations?
Now, novelty and usefulness can go hand in hand. Indeed, some of the best examples of
groundbreaking ideas are ones that combine high levels of novelty and higher levels of usefulness.
The process to which such ideas are generated involve periods of divergence, where people generate
lots of possibilities and push for novelty, and periods of convergence, where people narrow down
those possibilities, and make choices about how to move forward, thus pushing for usefulness.
Now, during the divergent thinking phase, it is really important to push for novelty. The best way of
doing this is to usually generate a large number of ideas, generate a large enough quantity, and
you're likely to get something quite novel. During this phase, ideas can be combined and categorized.
The best idea can be chosen afterwards.
In other words, don't jump to convergent thinking too fast. Now, you know that creativity is
characterized by novelty and usefulness.
Individual creativity
In the 1980s, Harvard scientist, Teresa Amabile created a model that specifies the factors that are
important for people to become creative. She specified three factors.
Teresa argues that all three of these factors are necessary for creativity to arise.
1. Expertise - technical, procedural, and intellectual knowledge about the domain that one is
working in.
First, if you don't have enough knowledge about a certain area, you don't know what has been done
before, so you might be working on something that's not novel enough.
Second, with too little expertise, you have no knowledge of where the boundaries in this area are. You
might be working on something spectacular and you wouldn't even recognize it.
Third, you don't know what is feasible. Maybe you're working on a type of solution that simply
doesn't work.
Finally, you may not know what is useful and you may come up with ideas that are completely
irrelevant.
,Unless you have enough expertise, it is very hard to be creative.
2. Motivation - the willingness and interest in conducting the task that one is doing.
a. Extrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation is about doing a certain task, not because you like it, but because
of something else that you get out of it.
b. Intrinsic motivation
Doing a certain task because you really love doing it, without getting anything else
out of it other than the joy and satisfaction you would get just out of doing the task.
Benefits: you often are more willing to overcome obstacles when they arise; you are
more willing to put in the extra effort; you have more willingness to continue after
failure; makes you have more willingness to work hard and to think continuously
about the problem.
3. Creative thinking skills - how flexibly and imaginatively people can approach problems.
This is all about how flexibly and imaginatively you can approach problems. This is not easy actually,
because many people go through their lives as robots as though things are really just scripted for
them.
Disadvantages:
It can work against you if you want to come up with a creative solution. Being creative might be very
difficult if you act like a robot, if you use automatic scripts and schemas that are in your head.
Also, you will make too many assumptions about what's going on.
Enhancing individual creativity/ creative thinking skills
The main problem with creative thinking skills is that people go through life not thinking about things
too much most of the time.
2 types of techniques to enhance creative thinking skills:
1. Analogical thinking
Analogical thinking is a technique that allows you to get a novel perspective on a problem.
Essentially, it involves using information from a different domain to produce new ideas within the
target domain. Successful analogical thinking typically involves two stages:
1. Identifying a novel domain.
When you identify a novel domain, it should be sufficiently distant from the target
domain, but have some elements that are relevant to it.
2. Transferring relevant knowledge from that domain into the new domain.
Specifically, you want to transfer those elements of knowledge that have similarities
to the problem you are experiencing.
2. Applying constraints or limitations
Too much freedom can reduce motivation to change and create a lot of uncertainty about what to do.
Constraints can create the impetus to do something different to reduce uncertainty and cognitive load
and provide direction for creative efforts.
Time constraints
Financial constraints
Output constraints
, Scamper tool
Scamper actually stands for a couple of questions that you can ask when you're doing a creative task.
S - substituting
C - combined
A - adapt
M - magnify, minimize or modify
P - put to other use
E – eliminate
R - reversal or rearrange
How it works:
You look at your product or service or a business model that needs to be changed and then you look at
all the various parts of your product or service and for each of these parts you ask yourself question,
can I substitute this part for something else? Can I eliminate this part for something else?
Why is it useful?
- It forces you to explicitly ask questions that you would normally never think of.
- By asking all of these questions you will get a really good overview for the possibilities of a
certain product and in this way you can overcome automatic schemas and scripts and
assumptions. It structures the idea generation task for you.
Brainstorming
2 common problems regarding brainstorming in groups
1. production blocking
It's just very difficult to listen to other people and at the same time to think about your
own ideas. Production blocking decreases the quantity and quality of ideas that a
group generates. It's one of the most important reasons why teams are actually not so
successful in generating ideas during a brainstorm.
2. evaluation apprehension
It refers to the notion that we don't want to be negatively evaluated. This fear of being
negatively evaluated is really harmful for creativity, especially because the ideas that
aren't mentioned are often the most unique ones.
The consequences are severe because when people don't share their unique
and maybe crazy ideas, then we only get similar ideas. This is problematic
because we want a lot of very different ideas so that we can combine the best
ones.
How to overcome production blocking and evaluation apprehension: the nominal group technique.
The nominal group technique:
1. a facilitator welcomes everyone and explains the task.
2. instead of sharing ideas immediately, the first thing that people have to do is to generate ideas
on their own and in silence.
3. only after generating ideas on their own and in silence are people invited to share their ideas
with each other.
4. after sharing all the ideas, they discuss the ideas to make sure everyone understands them.
5. the ideas are all ranked to see which ones will be adopted.
The key element in the nominal group technique is the silent generation of ideas. When we are
thinking of ideas silently, we won't have the problem of production blocking simply because our
