An inventor's view of creativity and innovation
Since 1938 when he began with what was then the National Bureau of Standards, Jacob Rabinow has personally accounted for a broad range of inventions and over 230 U.S. patents. On March 1, 1999, Industry Week ran an excellent article on Mr. Rabinow, titled "A Modern Day Ben Franklin." Here are some quotes from Rabinow as taken from that article.
"You often hear that inventions are an answer to the demands of the marketplace. I don't know where this nonsense comes from. Most great inventions create the marketplace. The whole trick of inventing is to invent something that you can convince people that they need before they know they need it."
"Invention by a team is fiction. Inventions are nearly always single-minded."
"Invention is an art form. There's no more logical than composing music or writing poetry. How can you logically compose "Rhapsody in Blue?" Invention, like any art form, is a game of change. Luck plays an enormous part in the beginning. You struggle and struggle, then suddenly it hits you."
"You take old gears, old musical notes, old words, all the greatness that has come before you, all the information that you have in your head, you throw it up in the air and see what happens. Some of the combinations look good; others are trash and you discard them. The trick is to combine them in some new and startling and beautiful way.... I liken invention to the punch line of a good joke; unexpected, it surprises you, and it's correct."
WALLY'S COMMENT ... I love it when practitioners cut through some of the faddish beliefs. Right now, the value of teams is being much over-rated. Why? Because it's been under-rated for too long, and this is a reaction. Fads are inherently cyclic.
We know that teams are good for things like brainstorming and getting ideas started. We know that teams, groups of people, are far better at judgment than individuals. But it takes individuals with time and a tinge of zealotry to do the kind of work that makes for inventing or for innovation in organizations, or for building businesses.
Good creative work pretty much happens by individuals in isolation. It can then be modified, massaged, improved upon and implemented by teams, but generally they're someone set off by themselves beavering away and getting the job done.
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What's Creativity? What's Innovation?
For business purposes, it's a good idea to distinguish between creativity and innovation. The following are my definitions.
Creativity is the process of coming up with ideas. Human beings actually do this naturally. What separates highly "creative" people from others seems to be two things.
Creative people believe they can get good ideas. And creative people find a way to capture the ideas that they get.
Innovation is the process of turning ideas into practical reality. This takes hard work and technique.
I've written an article about this called 62 Tips for Getting Good Ideas When You Need Them.
In that article, you'll also find several recommendations on creativity and innovation books.
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Encouraging Creativity
Robert Half International commissioned a survey that drew responses from 150 executives in the nation's 1000 largest companies. Those executives were asked to compare whether employers were doing more or less to encourage employers to be creative and innovative today than five years ago.
89% said they were doing more. Only 5% said they were doing less.
WALLY'S COMMENT ... My perception of all of this is that companies are not in fact doing more to encourage creativity and innovation among their employees, but they're making a better show of it than they used to. In fact, I'd say that it would be more accurate to say that they were doing more exhorting of their employees to creativity and innovation.
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Creativity in Business
Former Chrysler top executive Bob Lutz, when being interviewed by INC Magazine (March 1999) had this to say. "It's much more difficult to make an orderly company behave more creatively than it is to take a creative company and make it more orderly."
WALLY'S COMMENT ... That's dead-on true. It's fairly easy to find people to come in and build structure around the creative folks, letting them do their thing. It's very, very much harder to get folks who are used to structure and coloring inside the lines to take what they perceive as a risk, and color outside.
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Some Creativity and Innovation Websites
Innovation Network: Corporate Innovation & Creativity
Mind Tools
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Wally's Contribution
Some years back, I helped a major oil company develop and roll out a creativity and innovation course. That project gave me the opportunity to review the available literature on creativity and innovation. I couldn't find a practical summary of the research, so I wrote one. It's called "62 Tips for Getting Good Ideas When You Need Them."
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Good General and Practical Books on Creativity
Conceptual Blockbusting: a Guide to Better Ideas by James Adams has the nice structured feel of an engineer's approach to creativity. You might say it's "elegant." Check it out or order from Amazon.com
Creativity in Business by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers is based on their course in business creativity, taught at the Stanford Business School. In addition to giving lots of good business examples, the book includes excellent background on the underlying brain function and various cultural approaches. Check it out or order from Amazon.com
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