Module 1- Generating Ideas- Part 3

Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is the process by which individuals come up with new ideas or new approaches to business. New ideas could result in a new product - for example, a games console. They could also result in a new process that cuts costs or improves quality - for example, a bagless vacuum cleaner as designed by James Dyson.

EXAMPLE-Example of James Dyson’s creative thinking and innovation.

Fresh ideas give businesses a competitive advantage and help make their goods or services stand out in the market place.

Entrepreneurs can make use of several different thinking techniques to improve their creativity. We encourage all our young people to be creative when they are trying to think of business ideas.

Some young people may feel that aren’t creative or find it difficult to think of new or different ideas. There are a number of techniques for helping young people to be creative.

Edward De Bono (pioneer of lateral thinking- 1967) believes that creativity is a skill that everyone can learn. In one lateral thinking workshop in Africa, he said that the attendants thought of 21,000 new ideas. We want to give young people a similar sense of optimism when they start thinking about their business ideas.

Creative Thinking Techniques

Lateral thinking

Lateral thinking or thinking outside the box and finding unique solutions to problems. It involves challenging an existing concept or idea.

EXAMPLE- Breaking down the steps taken to serve coffee in a café and asking 'why' at each step to see if a better process can be created.

EXAMPLE- You have a client who sells tractors. If you were thinking in a linear fashion, you may feel the need to create content about how great tractors are because you need to sell tractors. Thinking about things laterally though opens up a world of possibilities. Try looking at the bigger picture. Tractors are a key component to farming, farming produces food and resources. Farms also house animals. A popular children’s rhyme about farm animals is Old McDonald, you may wonder how that rhyme came to be. Why not create content around the origin of that rhyme?

Deliberate creativity

Deliberate creativity uses thinking techniques to spark off new ideas. For example, putting on different thinking hats to tackle problems from different angles. One of the more popular approaches is the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ method where each member of a group thinks from a defined perspective.

The Disney Creative Strategy

The Disney Creative Strategy is a tool for brainstorming and developing ideas. It is similar to the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ but it involves using three sequential roles, or thought processes, namely the Dreamer, the Realist, and the Critic.

As a team imagines and develop their ideas, they move from one role to the next, putting themselves into these different mindsets, so that they can better analyse what they're doing.

Blue sky thinking

Blue-sky thinking involves a group of people looking at an opportunity with fresh eyes. As many ideas as possible are generated in an ideas generation session where no ideas are rejected as silly.

Part of the process of thinking creatively and coming up with a new business idea is to ask the right questions. For example, looking at a successful product and asking - why, why not, how, where, when, what, what if?

Other creative thinking methods

Changing perspectives involves imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. Try to think like a potential consumer, what are your priorities? What would you like to buy? It can be helpful to select a potential consumer e.g. a teenager and draw them in as much detail as possible from their clothing to their hobbies. This activity can present unusual ideas for products or services. Young people can also imagine how other people would approach coming up with a business idea e.g. ‘If I were….(Prime Minister/Lady GaGa/Dr Dre etc.) I would think of….’

Inspiration from the outside world involves using the environment to spark creativity. While it may not always be possible to take a MyBnk group outside, you can always ask them to look out the window and see if there is anything that might trigger business ideas. Seeing an urban landscape may help young people to think about what products a city dweller may want or need in their lives.

Crawford’s Slip Writing Method involves harnessing the creative power of an entire team. Invented in the 1920s by Dr C.C. Crawford, Professor of Education at the University of Southern California, the method simply involves collating input from people on slips of paper (nowadays often on sticky notes). This allows everyone in the team to contribute and it levels the playing field between quieter people and more outspoken participants. People can also draw their ideas if they are not as confident with writing.

Innovation involves improving a product or service that already exists. Innovation may make something more exciting and/or offer a higher quality experience to the customer. Innovation should improve the existing product or service by at least 20%. We encourage young people to innovate in MyBnk enterprise programmes even if it is just in a small way e.g. unusual icing on a cupcake.

EXAMPLE-Innocent smoothies- they didn’t invent smoothies but they did innovate by only including fruit and devising distinctive branding.

Another good example of innovation is from the world of music. We use this example in Back My Business sessions.

EXAMPLE- People first listened to music in their own homes on record players. However, records were fragile, easily scratched and a record player was far from portable. The record player was innovated and the cassette player was born. The cassette player had many improvements from the record player- it was portable, tapes were more robust and they could hold more songs. However, songs couldn’t be selected with the limited buttons of the tape player and tape film would unwind. Further innovation led to the CD player- this allowed individual song selection and was lighter than the tape player. However, music skipped if the CD player was moved and CD’s while smaller, were easily scratched. The most recent innovation in music has been the rise of digital music that solves nearly all of the problems of previous devices and allows users to carry their entire collection with them.

EXAMPLE- Interesting video on how people come with ideas- argues that there aren’t Eureka moments but slow hunches that need to collide with other slow hunches in collaborative environments.

Target market

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