Insights On Creativity From The World’s Leading Innovators
New Ideas About New Ideas
By Shira White
In New Ideas About New Ideas, Shira explores innovation across a whole host of different companies. This is not a book on how to innovate but a description of what constitutes the creative process.
On Leap Innovation
“Innovation has become a lot more important to corporate leaders, in the last decade in particular, because of changes in the business environment brought on by increased technological capabilities spread…But while many companies say they are ‘making innovation happen’ for most of them, innovation is based on old ideas, principles and processes. At best, their innovation are incremental. While there is nothing wrong in achieving small gains, this view on innovation shuts out the truly startling cases of leap innovations.
Leap Innovations occur when someone discovers an entirely new approach to a problem, an approach that changes life in some significant way…The leap innovation emphasises the act of moving into the unknown or unexplored, rather than just breaking with predictable patterns of innovation.”
On The Status Quo
To the man who has only a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail — Abraham Maslow
White writes about an experiment with houseflies whether scientists captured and kept houseflies in a jar. They then removed the lid from the jar and watched as the houseflies did not fly to freedom. “They seem committed to a lid that is no longer there. Psychologists have identified this phenomenon as “premature cognitive commitment”.
On Brainstorming
“Many traditional companies have formalised the process of brainstorming, reducing it to an activity often characterised as the untrained leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary. However, many, if not most, successful innovations come from the “wrong places”. After 25 years of studying IBM, GE, Polaroid and Xero, James Quinn of Dartmouth found that not a single major product had come from the formal planning process”.
Introduction: Sizzling Spaces
Popular opinion never produces innovation — Satjiv Chahil, CMO, Palm Inc.
White describes how “When Innovation is a key goal, creative talent is the most precious resources.” , going on to state that “creativity resides only in marketing or in R&D or in engineering, for example, but not in the rest of the organisation, innovation is next to impossible.” The point is made that “innovation flow is often interrupted by the boundaries of specialisation…Innovation is not a discrete activity, it is not compartmentalised”.
Spark Soup
White describes how naivety is often key for innovation to take hold stating that “We can require too much information, after which there are diminishing returns or even damage. The insatiable need to know more before taking action, coupled with the delusion that we can know it all, sabotages innovation”. She describes how most the Silicon Valley legends were in their early twenties as “They never had to unlearn conventional wisdom or struggle to break free of bad ingrained habits”.
Bubbling
White discusses how “Creativity is a way of life” for innovative companies/people. She quotes Myhrvold (former Microsoft CTO) as saying his life is a “series of episodes” in which he has no intention “of picking one single thing I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life”.
We don’t simply need compartmentalised creative processes such as brainstorming sessions. We need to live creative lives.
White also values seperating yourself from the day-to-day operations to allow yourself to think freely citing Bill Joy, chief scientist of SUN Microsystems, who works out of his own office to avoid getting sidelined by mundane questions, meetings and processes
Aspen Smallworks is the name Joy gave his aerie in downtown Aspen, three blocks from the ski lifts (he complains he doesn’t get enough time on the slopes). There he and a handful of Sun associates “incubate” their creations far from Silicon Valley distractions such as traffic jams, back-to-back meetings, and McNealy. Says Joy: “I moved out here in 1991 because back in Palo Alto, when my office was next to Scott’s, I couldn’t even think. Every ten minutes he’d bother me with another one of his crazy ideas.”.
Going Live
White discusses innovation telling the story of the architect Gehry. When asked how he designed buildings such as the Guggenheim which were incredible forward thinking at the time. He describes how he was able to build these as “one of my guys met an aviation engineer, and convinced him to come play with us”. The gentleman brought the newly released CAD systems to the project allowing it to be designed computationally vs current architectural methods.
New technology can liberate us, allowing for us to conduct countless experiments by modelling innumerable combinations, configurations and permutations.
White goes on to describe Capital One’s philosophy of continuous testing. In 2000, the company performed 45,000 experiments on all aspects of the business.
