Innovation continues to challenge us to be more creative; especially when incremental insights or ideas are not going to make enough of a difference to a client’s business challenges. Recently i had dinner with friends, including a film maker who puts aside 8 am-12 every day to just focus on his writing. No email. No calls. It made me consider how much of my day is shaped by responding to email (and how quickly a day is oriented around a machine across the research world).
As run different types of workshops, it is interesting to consider an adjacent industry. If we thought we were directing consumers (as opposed to actors), what would we do differently? How would we use verbs for example? How would we place people into the subtext - world underneath the words of the page; underneath the surface of a category. To paraphase, good directors, actors, researchers work from subtext not from the result.
Where we work also impacts on the outputs. Scientific American Mind has a recent article on How room designs affect your work. The height of a room’s ceiling affects how people think, higher ceiling leads to more abstract ideas and lower ceilings leads to more concrete detail. The underlying requirement is the perception of space which can also be created through light coloured paint or mirrors. Views of natural settings help people to concentrate. If we want to see the same things, but think different thoughts; where we think may indeed matter.
David Armano’s work shows us the different types of output that can be achieved through better creative, and better visual thinking.
From metacool
This blog post considers the different types of innovation, and challenges for mainstream organisation (and therefore mainstream research or thinking). “Three different flavors of innovation are defined by these quadrants:
Incremental Innovation: you seek to deliver improvements to offerings you already sell to people who you understand fairly well. Your capabilities as an organization are designed to deliver these offerings to these people.
Evolutionary Innovation: one aspect of your offering (either unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar offering space) is changing as you seek to bring new something to market, forcing you to evolve away from what you know. Your mainstream organization will be only partially equipped to successfully innovate here.
Revolutionary Innovation: the proverbial blank sheet of paper. Everything is new, as you don’t have a history with the offerings, nor do you understand the people here. Your mainstream organization not only is not equipped to innovate successfully here, it won’t even see the value in innovating here.”
from metacool: designing