Creativity Exercising

This week I spent a lot of time with creativity exercises.  They were not only fun; they also helped me realized that ideas are not hard to generate given the right environment and stimulation.  For example, in Dr. K's class, each group of 6 was given 15 minutes to come up with ideas to help the Kelley school using post-it notes.  My group wrote down a dozen of them, ranging from post-it art murals to color-coded mood indicators that you would post at the front of the room before class and after class.  Ideas truly are a dime a dozen as the saying goes… or are they?

            

Recently I have been immersed in watching Bones, a crime drama on TV.  Earlier this week, while reading the textbook for the class, I decided to do one of the creative exercises from the book (“Entrepreneurship: Theory/Process/Practice”, written by Dr. K).  The exercise calls for writing down all of the functions you can think of for a given list of items.  For each of the physical objects on the list (“A large pebble”, “an old hubcap”, “an old coat hanger”), I found myself thinking “murder weapon” as the first function that came to mind.  And for each of the people on the list (“An egotistical staff member”, “The office tightwad”), I found myself first thinking “potential suspect.”

Why did I first jump to crime-related functions for those objects and people?  I suspect the reason has to do with Phase 1 of the Creative Process: Background or Knowledge Accumulation. (The four/six phases of the creative process are documented throughout innovation research, but I won't delve into them here.)  Since I have been “educated” about crimes through watching Bones, I am likely to think of solutions to problems in the crime space.  However, what I believe is the most critical part of Background or Knowledge Accumulation is recency.  The more recent an experience has been had, the more likely it is to be the subject of ideas in creative exercises.  Put another way, the ideas generated in a creative exercise are most likely to come from recent knowledge-gathering activities or recent experiences.

This has important ramifications for innovation, particularly in a corporate situation.  Consider a team that has recently completed a big, important project, and now it is asked to have an “ideation” session where it is to brainstorm for 30 minutes on ideas for new products or product features for the company.  I’m willing to bet that most of the ideas would be small features to be added to the project that was recently completed.  In other words, you would get ideas for incremental innovations.  But what if you really need radical innovations?

In order to get ideas for radical innovations, you need to introduce variety and take advantage of the effect of recency.  Shortly before asking your employees to brainstorm, have them do things outside of activities related to the recent project.  Have them visit customers, read international news, go to the beach - anything that will help them get a different perspective than what they would have being heads-down on a project.  Social events are not just good at keeping employees happy on the job; they can also jumpstart creativity and, by extension, innovation.

This line of thinking has encouraged me to try to move Napkin Club to varying locations and varying days.  “Same time, same place” may make it easy to remember, but it can hurt creativity.

Baby Steps

Last week I started in on the academic portion of my Kelley education on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship.  The class is called Entrepreneurship: Leadership and Practice, taught by an enthusiastic pioneer of the field, Dr. Donald Kuratko (known to students as Dr. K).  On Tuesday, Dr. K introduced the principles of "corporate entrepreneurship," otherwise known as "corporate innovation" or "intrapreneurship."

One topic in particular really got me thinking on Tuesday: Dr. K noted that companies are more successful with their innovation programs if they start with incremental innovations as opposed to radical innovations.  He rationalized the data by saying that if senior management came in and announced that the company was looking for breakthroughs, middle management would get turned off because they didn't see themselves or their employees as "breakthrough"-type people.  In other words, a company just beginning its transition to an entrepreneurial culture needs to take "baby steps" to start its journey.  While Dr. K’s explanation of the point made rational sense, my immediate reaction was, What about the employees who have really good radically innovative ideas already?

That brought me back to May 2008, soon after I started working as a software engineer at Intuit.  One business unit (the one responsible for TurboTax) held their first-ever “Idea Jam,” a competition where teams could pitch their innovative ideas to senior executives.  The CEO personally flew down for the event and prefaced it by challenging employees to “discover the next growth engine for the company.”  A few colleagues and I entered the competition with an idea for a social network aggregator, and others pitched (and some demonstrated) truly amazing ideas, such as a smartpen mashup that translated writing and drawings from paper to computer screen instantly.  However, none of the ideas that blew me away were mentioned when the awards were given out.  No, the top prize went to TaxCaster, a web application that forecasts your tax refund from a limited set of data you input.  Senior management invested in TaxCaster and it launched a few months later (http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/).  While TaxCaster was a great idea and has since certainly increased sales of TurboTax, it wasn’t anything close to the next growth engine for the company.  It was an incremental innovation.

The experience of seeing a set of amazing (and radical) innovations get passed by in favor of a small one caused many of my colleagues to become bitter about the company’s innovation efforts.  It took some of them two years before they participated in any events like Idea Jam again; they were unenthusiastic about pitching ideas to managers who were only interested in add-ons to TurboTax.

While I now understand the logic behind focusing on incremental innovations first, I wonder if that logic fails to account for those in the company who are already entrepreneurial and are ready for radical innovation.  Are baby steps worth the risk of losing the participation of the most entrepreneurial employees?  Or is there some other action that leadership could take to encourage radical innovators to stay engaged?

The Silicon Valley MBA

For the past three weeks I was on hiatus, as many b-school students were for the holidays.  Out of my desires to find a summer internship and to learn about innovation in the discipline's flagship metro area, I flew to the Bay Area to meet with companies, Kelley School alums, friends, and strangers.

Several of the company visits were arranged by my colleagues in the Kelley Marketing Club as a Bay Area trek.  One of the stops on the trek was Google, a world-renowned hotbed of entrepreneurial thinking.  My first sight upon entering the visitor's lobby in Building 43 was a bit unexpected: roughly one million b-school students in suits.  The dichotomy of suits shaking hands with Googlers in jeans was striking.  I mean, really, you thought it was a good idea to dress seventeen levels above the people you're meeting?  However, it turns out my shock at seeing a bunch of suits at Google was somewhat controversial, as I found out from a fellow Kelley student who was feeling self-conscious in her business-casual attire.

"What do you wear to an interview in Silicon Valley?" she asked me.

"I would say business casual at the most, since most people here go to work in jeans," I replied.

She gave me a look.  "But don't we have to wear suits to interviews?  I mean, we're MBAs."

No, that doesn't fly here.  During my three-month stint in San Francisco and my numerous visits to the Valley, I have found that the perceptions of the term "MBA" range from "respected business leader" to "former coder who couldn't make it" to "out of touch ivory tower dweller."  I recently had a conversation with the founder of a tech startup at a coffee shop in San Francisco.  After I told him that I was an MBA student, his first question to me was, "Do they make you do anything at your school?"

And this attitude isn't just limited to startups.  A former coworker of mine often lamented that product managers just shot down all the ideas of engineers, killing their entrepreneurial spirit.  True, business school is great at teaching students about the multitudes of things that don't work.  Admittedly, when I mull over Harvard Business Review cases, more often than not I am tempted to answer with "liquidate the business, this will just fail and waste money."  No wonder MBAs are not universally regarded highly, to put it mildly, in a Valley culture that rewards those who try, fail, and confidently pick themselves up to try again.  But it's hard to blame business leaders for adopting such a risk-aversion.  Engineers are told to fail fast, to learn from their mistakes, and that at some point along the line they will develop something that customers will be happy with; a great engineer understands the value of iteration and feedback.  By contrast, when a middle- or upper-level manager oversees a failed project, she is quite often the subject of a "with mixed emotions" email to the group.

What does this mean for promoting an innovative culture?  What can an MBA do to foster such a culture in such an environment as the Silicon Valley tech scene?  Well, it starts with accepting the "risk-aversion" learned in business school as "prudence."  It is prudent to not bet the farm on an idea or a product created in a vacuum, of course.  But as we can learn from Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, it is also prudent to put resources behind seemingly non-sensical product lines that have the potential to cannibalize sales from other product lines.  The keys in that situation are to develop the new products in autonomous (in a practical sense) organizations, and have them find or develop new markets for their new products, not attempt to satisfy the needs of the company's current customers.  Dismissing the development of such disruptive products is not only bad for creating an entrepreneurial culture, it can also be dangerous to the business itself by opening the door to disruption from startups, a malady seen time and time again in Christensen's study of the computer disk drive industry.

Put succinctly, an MBA can gain credibility by promoting innovation within an engineering-focused organization while at the same time remaining prudent, as she is taught to be in business school.  The key to Silicon Valley opening its arms to MBAs lies in that very concept.