Innovation: Exploiting Creativity

Transcription

1 C H A P T E R 8 Innovation: Exploiting Creativity But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality. Hayao Miyazaki, 1941, Film Director Back in Chapter 3, I showed how it was possible to blend together models of the creative problem-solving process and engineering design. I presented engineering design as a special case of creative problem solving and explained that four factors the 4Ps help or hinder creativity (and therefore engineering design) at each stage of the process. I then spent the next four chapters studying each of those 4Ps Person, Product, Process, and Press in more detail in order to understand how they can act either to foster or inhibit creativity. I am now in a position to bring all of that information together in a single model that describes the impact of the 4Ps on the process of generating and exploiting effective and novel solutions. We can now also put a new label on that process: innovation. The purpose of this chapter is to draw these threads together. I will briefly describe why the term innovation is an appropriate one for us to use now, and I will then give you the single model that serves as a high-level summary of all factors, phases, and their creativity-favoring poles. Equipped with this information, you will then know what aspects of the Product, Process, Person, and Press favor creativity, and therefore innovation, at each stage of the engineering problem-solving process, and be ready to drill deeper as required in order to get the best result at every step. D. H. Cropley and Cropley (2014) give a detailed discussion of the Person in the context of innovation. Finally, in keeping with my emphasis on measurement as the mechanism for turning ideas Creativity in Engineering Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

2 INNOVATION: EXPLOITING CREATIVITY into useful tools, I will describe a measuring instrument the Innovation Phase Assessment Instrument (IPAI). The IPAI has been developed to assist managers of innovation in diagnosing how well aligned a team or organization is to the conditions that we know favor creativity and innovation, at each step of the problem-solving process. DEFINING INNOVATION Early in this book, I discussed the drivers that are connecting creativity and engineering. These drivers stem from change and a pervasive need to react to that change with novel technological solutions. Over the preceding four chapters, I have built up the idea that creative technological solutions engineering solutions are designed and developed by individuals, frequently working in teams, and within the environment of specific organizations. Furthermore, these solutions are creative because they are, as a minimum, both effective and novel. Crucially, this activity takes place across a number of phases, each of which has particular requirements for creativity to be realized successfully. Creativity, at its core, is the generation of effective novelty. The more we discuss the overall activity developing novel technological solutions to problems the more helpful it seems to be to have a term that is a little broader. In many ways, however, this is dictated by the different disciplines that have an interest in this activity. It is clear that engineers have an interest in creative problem solving that is the reason for this book. However, economists are also vitally interested in the activity for what it tells them about how organizations and entire nations function economically. These economic approaches generally trace their development back to Schumpeter s (1942) Theory of Economic Development and are concerned with the commercial, financial, and organizational aspects of creative problem solving. They also prefer the term innovation. At the highest level of abstraction a macro level (for instance, national innovation policy) innovation is understood to be vital to meeting the challenges of the early 21st century arising from technological advances, social change, globalization, and now the global financial crisis. At an intermediate, meso level (the individual organization), innovation is a key to organizational effectiveness and competitive advantage (Davis, 2009, p. 25) and thus ultimately to commercial success and creation of wealth. If creativity is the generation of effective novelty, then innovation implies a particular focus on the exploitation of that effective novelty. The term value innovation (W. C. Kim & Mauborgne, 2004; T. A. Dillon, Lee, & David, 2005) is somewhat more explicit: it focuses on innovation as a process through which organizations find novel and effective ways of

3 DEFINING INNOVATION 219 serving their current customers and identifying new markets, thus linking innovation to what customers value. This terminology makes it clear that at the level of organizations innovation is not just a matter of coming up with a new idea but requires a valuable product. However, product is not confined to technological devices or even tangible objects, but covers the full value chain, including marketing, market research, sales, advertising, distribution, and customer service. Bledow et al. (2009) defined innovation as the development and intentional introduction into practice of new and useful ideas by individuals, teams, and organizations, while Luecke and Katz (2003) illustrated the process as shown in Figure 8.1. In the context of innovation, they preferred to think of creativity as invention, emphasizing the generational aspect of creativity in the overall process. Mokyr (1990) also distinguishes between invention and innovation, drawing on the work of Schumpeter and noting that invention does not imply innovation (p. 9). Mokyr (1990) further noted that Without invention, innovation will eventually slow down and grind to a halt... Without innovation, inventors will lack focus and have little economic incentive to pursue new ideas (pp ). In other words, creativity and innovation are highly interdependent two sides of the same problem-solving coin. Idea generation Opportunity recognition Idea evaluation Development Commercialization Invention (creativity) Exploitation Innovation FIGURE 8.1 The innovation process (Luecke & Katz, 2003).

4 INNOVATION: EXPLOITING CREATIVITY COMPETITION AND INNOVATION Another benefit of thinking of creativity in the broader context of innovation and economics is that we develop a deeper understanding of the impact of a competitive business environment. In earlier chapters, I indicated that creativity, and especially engineering problem solving, is a competitive endeavor. I also suggested that the core characteristic of creativity novelty confers competitive advantages on the creating organization. Two types of competitive environment exist, and creativity/innovation plays an important role in each. Scramble competition (F. M. Hruby, 1998) describes a competitive landscape in which new players emerge with no notice with a new product. Contest competition, by contrast, involves established players battling for a share of existing markets. In both cases, the competitive advantage stems from effective novelty. This may, in the case of the scramble competitor, be the application of a new technology or the identification of a new need (or both) in other words, driven by either technology push or market pull (see Chapter 2). In the case of the contest competitor, the drivers remain the same; however, the scale and pace of the innovation may be lower. The difference between scramble competitors and contest competitors therefore lies not in the nature of what they do finding solutions to problems driven by supply (of technology) and (customer) demand but in the scale and pace of how they do it. Scramble competitors are more likely to disrupt the competitive environment with wholly new technologies meeting, or creating, completely new needs, whereas contest competitors are more likely to make incremental changes to existing technologies and needs. Christensen (1999) described these two classes of innovation as sustaining they give customers more and better in the attributes they already value (p. 8), and disruptive they introduce a very different package of attributes to a marketplace than the ones that mainstream customers have historically valued (p. 9). For the purpose of the present discussion, the key point is that both forms of competition draw on the generation of effective novelty creativity as the determinant of success. The question of how these different forms of innovation interact is also important in understanding the value of creativity. UNDERSTANDING INNOVATION Whatever term we used to describe the process of exploiting effective novelty value innovation seems a good fit to the engineering problemsolving context the key remains understanding what factors determine

5 THE INNOVATION PHASE ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT (IPAI) 221 the success or failure of this activity. I have endeavored to build up a framework for understanding creativity across the stages of engineering problem solving, based on the 4Ps and a recognition that what is good for creativity in one phase may be bad for creativity in another. The idea that there is a complex relationship between the 4Ps and the phases of creative problem solving is not without precedent in the literature of innovation. For example, Bledow et al. (2009) pointed out (p. 306) that a pervasive theme in research on organizational innovation is that innovation is characterized by tensions... paradoxes... contradictions... [and] dilemmas. These generate apparently conflicting demands and call for what seem to be conflicting activities. Dealing with the conflicts necessitates a dialectical perspective. Lewis et al. (2002) identified tensions ; Miron, Erez, and Naveh (2004), paradoxes ; and Benner and Tushman (2003), dilemmas. Haner (2005) gave a good example of a paradox revealed by research on groups and innovation: innovation requires simultaneous agreement and disagreement (p. 291) among the members of the group, consensus, and yet absence of consensus. Looking at the individual, Hulsheger, Anderson, and Salgado (2009) gave another example: the need both to do things your own way and yet also rigorously implement other people s ideas. These tensions, paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas are exactly what I have described in the context of engineering problem solving. Critically, the key management issue is to integrate and balance... complementary processes (Bledow et al., 2009, p. 364) so that the process of developing and exploiting creative solutions to complex technological problems can be as successful as possible. Haner (2005, p. 297) called for research on principles according to which organizational innovation... can be conceptualized. Although they were not writing directly about innovation but indirectly via a discussion of creativity and personality, Batey and Furnham (2006) made a highly relevant call for a comprehensive taxonomization (p. 410). They went further and suggested that such a taxonomy should be based on the 4Ps approach. THE INNOVATION PHASE ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT (IPAI) One response to the various calls for addressing paradoxes of innovation has been developed using the foundation of psychological concepts of creativity described in earlier chapters. In Chapter 3, I spelled out a model of the phases involved in creative and engineering problem solving. They map closely to the general model of innovation represented in Figure 8.1. For each one of these phases I showed, in Chapters 4 7, how each of the 4Ps Product, Process, Person, and Press must

6 INNOVATION: EXPLOITING CREATIVITY oscillate between two fundamental poles as the phases unfold. In some phases, for example, divergent thinking is necessary or active in creativity, whereas in other phases, convergent thinking is active. In the course of those four chapters, I have built up model of the innovation process the exploitation of effective novelty that provides an answer to the question of how to conceptualize innovation and how to integrate and balance seemingly conflicting requirements. The Innovation Phase Model (Table 8.1) was first described by A. J. Cropley and Cropley (2008) in the context of creativity education, and later in D. H. Cropley and Cropley (2010b) for the first time in the more general context of organizational innovation. The model was then developed as the basis for diagnosing the alignment of organizations to conditions ideal for creativity and innovation in D. H. Cropley and Cropley (2011), and this became formalized as an instrument the Innovation Phase Assessment Instrument (IPAI) in D. H. Cropley and Cropley (2012) and D. H. Cropley et al. (2013). The IPAI consists of a set of 168 questions that tap into the matrix of (42) nodes represented by the intersection of each phase and the 4Ps (Table 8.1) Person was given greater weight in the IPAI by expanding it to include motivation, personal properties, and feelings, as described in Chapter 6. For any given node for example, the intersection of Preparation and Process the IPAI defines four dichotomous (yes/no) questions that examine the respondent s view on which pole of the relevant paradox is representative of his organization. When the responses are analyzed, the IPAI is looking for differences between the ideal response for a given node for example, for Preparation/Process, the ideal is convergent thinking and the actual response given. Thus, while the theoretical ideal might be convergent thinking, a respondent might feel that divergent thinking is favored in the particular organization. By aggregating responses, one is able to build up a picture of an organization s overall alignment to the conditions that favor innovation at every stage. For example, if the members of an organization generally feel that people think divergently when that is appropriate, and convergently when that is appropriate, and so forth for the other Ps, then the organization is well aligned to the conditions necessary for success. Conversely, if members of an organization report a mismatch between the ideal conditions and actual conditions and behaviors, then the organization is poorly aligned. Table 8.2 gives a hypothetical example of the data for an organization assessed with the IPAI. The score in each node ranges from 0 none of the given responses corresponded to the ideal responses for that node and 4 all given responses corresponded to the ideal responses. Responses are aggregated across the entire sample and

7 TABLE 8.1 The Innovation Phase Model (IPM) Invention Exploitation Dimension Phase Poles Preparation Knowledge, problem recognition Activation Problem definition, refinement Generation Many candidate solutions Illumination A few promising solutions Verification A single optimal solution Communication A working prototype Validation A successful product Process Person (Motivation) Person (Properties) Person (Feelings) Product Press Convergent vs. Divergent Reactive vs. Proactive Adaptive vs. Innovative Conserving vs. Generative Routine vs. Creative High Demand vs. Low Demand Convergent Divergent Divergent Convergent Convergent Mixed Convergent Mixed Proactive Proactive Proactive Mixed Reactive Reactive Adaptive Innovative Innovative Innovative Adaptive Adaptive Adaptive Conserving Generative Generative Generative Conserving Conserving Conserving Routine Creative Creative Creative Routine Routine Routine High Low Low Low High High High

8 INNOVATION: EXPLOITING CREATIVITY TABLE 8.2 Hypothetical IPAI Data Phase dimension Preparation Activation Generation Illumination Verification Communication Validation Row sums Process Motivation Personal Properties Feelings Product Press Column Sums would normally result in more complex data; however, I have used integers in this example for simplicity and clarity. If an organization was perfectly aligned to the ideal conditions, as indicated by the respondents, then the maximum aggregate score on the IPAI is 168. Similarly, for each Phase (e.g., Preparation) or Dimension (e.g., Process), it is possible to compute an aggregate. In Table 8.2, the aggregate score for the Preparation phase is 20, while for Process it is 21. This means that there are three levels of analysis possible in the IPAI: Node, Phase/Dimension, and Total. The diagnostic rationale of the IPAI means that an appropriate approach to the interpretation of data is to examine relative strengths and weaknesses for a given organization. In addition, this interpretation must be made against an understanding of the aims and objectives of the organization. The total score is therefore of less interest than Phase, Dimension, and Node scores, with the possible exception of benchmarking across similar organizations. Once an organization has been assessed, the first level of analysis is to examine relative strengths and weaknesses for each Phase and Dimension. This is best done by computing a mean Phase score (19.29) and standard deviation (1.6) and a mean Dimension score (22.5) and standard deviation (2.43). Each individual Phase and Dimension score is then ranked as a strength, opportunity, threat, or weakness according to its score relative to the mean (Tables 8.3 and 8.4). Finally, individual nodes can be examined to locate specific areas for attention. In the example given, analysis might focus, for example, on

9 THE INNOVATION PHASE ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENT (IPAI) 225 TABLE 8.3 Interpretation of IPAI Phase Scores Classification Score band Preparation Activation Generation Illumination Verification Communication Validation Strength Opportunity Threat Weakness,17.68 TABLE 8.4 Interpretation of IPAI Dimension Scores Classification Score band Process Motivation Properties Feelings Product Press Strength Opportunity Threat Weakness,20.07 the Generation phase (Weakness). Studying Table 8.2, we can see that there are some areas of strength (Personal Properties [4] and Feelings [4]), but notable areas of relative weakness (Process [2]; Product [2]; and Press [2]). The diagnostic role of the IPAI is then to provide guidance for improving the weaknesses as a means for maximizing the potential for successful overall innovation. Guidance for improving weaknesses is therefore targeted and specific. A misalignment in Process means that, in the phase of Generation, where divergent thinking is most appropriate for a successful outcome (Table 8.1), there is a perceived misalignment in the organization; in other words, people in the organization perceive that divergent thinking is either not always possible or is hindered in some way in this phase. Further insight is then obtained by examining the specific questions that were misaligned for this node. For example, one of the misaligned questions for this node is Staff like to link disparate ideas. The ideal response for the Generation phase is that staff do like to link

10 INNOVATION: EXPLOITING CREATIVITY disparate ideas; i.e., they are able to engage in making remote associations. An approach to improving the organization relative to this node might therefore be to provide employees with improved skills in divergent thinking and better guidance for when these skills are appropriate. SUMMARY The IPAI is a response to the call for better integration and management of the range of paradoxical factors that influence the successful execution of the engineering problem-solving process. Its purpose is not to classify organizations, but to assist managers and employees in understanding how each of the 4Ps affects the process of innovation. It chief strength is that, unlike other instruments, it does not assume a one-size-fits-all approach to creativity and innovation. The IPAI is based on a theoretical model that acknowledges the paradoxes that are inherent to creativity and innovation. What is good for creativity in one phase, for example, may inhibit creativity in another phase. The IPAI helps managers to understand where they are in the process and whether their organization is aligned to the conditions needed for success in each phase.