Community Forum – Sparking Creativity

How do you spark creativity with limited resources? 

I am trying to establish a feeling of creativity and curiosity on what’s going on outside of the narrow world of our own products.  We have a sub team, CFIT (Cross functional Innovation team) who try to spark creativity each month, but not everyone on the entire product development team gets excited about what CFIT is trying to accomplish.  As a result, the CFIT team tends to get frustrated thinking they aren’t making progress. 

I am interested in how other organizations spark creativity with limited resources.   We converted an empty office into a “creativity room,” but with our limited resources there wasn’t much we could do with it.  Any suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated.  – Laurie Smith, Vice President, Research & Development, Pinnacle Foods Group

Community Responses

Will Goss, R&D Section Manager, Champion Technologies, Inc.
This question really gets right to the heart of an important issue about creativity that’s not too different from a similar question about motivation. Can you spark creativity? Can you motivate people? Or is the answer really about giving folks the necessary environment within which to be creative and motivate themselves? The questions are very related in many ways, but let’s avoid the philosophical and deal with the more practical aspects of your question. In my current section of 15 scientists we face a continuous backlog of requests for services (many “RUSH” requests) and are people, equipment, and space limited; where then can we spark creativity in amidst the stormy sea of our day jobs? My answer has been recently by using opportunities to be creative on projects that impact our ability to work more effectively. Notice that word was “effectively” not “efficiently” mainly because “effective” presupposes a necessary component of “efficient” without the baggage of tedious, inflexible structures. Some projects included: reorganizing lab equipment for improved workflow and people movement; creating a staging area for samples that reflected at a glance the urgency and type of work; developing meaningful, easy to compile metrics for understanding quickly how best to shift resources within the group. In addition we often put together 2-4 person teams to focus on problem solving projects with objectives and desired outputs but little else defined.

None of these activities consume additional resources but what they do is show how the creative problem solving skills are desired, supported, and hopefully rewarded. We use low budget rewards like lunches, gift cards of small amounts, or other inexpensive things to show that their efforts are really appreciated. My experience is that creativity is an individual chemistry catalyzed by interactions with others. The catalysis can be easily poisoned by even the most benevolent of dictatorial management styles; management must focus on defining only the boundaries, inputs and outputs, leaving the teams to decide on how to accomplish the rest. If they want advice or need support, management must always be there with the available support. I’d recommend reading “The One Minute Manager” and “Leadership and the One Minute Manager” by K. Blanchard which are wonderful reminders of the simple things we as managers can do to empower our people to do the jobs we hire them to do. Asking questions to groups and letting folks know they don’t need to provide immediate answers is another simple way to spark creativity, especially if those groups have regular interaction. It is the greatest challenge to have the patience as a manager to not “help” unnecessarily early on as your people struggle with this new paradigm you set before them. Of course, your organization like some others may already be at a level of maturity that will make these things easier to adopt without disruption.

Judy Giordan, Former VP R&D/CTO: IFF, PepsiCola and Henkel Corp  Currently: Chair VentureWell, a seed investment vehicle, and Senior Advisor NCIIA
Sparking creativity is an exciting thing to try and do…especially with us scientists and engineers who are trained to look at science dispassionately! Some learnings from my past include the following.

1.      RELEVANCE: people do what they are paid to do, not what they are told or asked to do. While it may sound like a cynical response, it isn’t meant to be! It’s really about clarity and expectations of roles and job descriptions. When our scientists and engineers “knew” that part of their job was new idea generation that led to revenues and they understood the link and path to get there, their creativity sometimes knew no bounds. Then it was about diverging and converging processes that allowed for and rewarded all ideas but created team focus on the selected ones…

2.      MAKE IT FUN: So contests are corny, and bonuses to do the jobs people are already supposed to do can feel like paying twice, BUT when the group tells YOU (within bounds, of course) what they would find fun and rewarding for doing a great job…you can build on it. In one company, it turned out to be a champagne luncheon (lest your insurance agents be getting concerned, 1 bottle of champagne/5 people so it is a taste only will keep blood alcohol levels in check…especially when coupled with a large lunch.) as reward and recognition for getting a new product successfully through the pilot plant. I am not advocating a champagne lunch, just the idea that the organization CHOSE what would be their reward and make it fun for them!  

3.      MARKET ALIGNMENT: In many companies, especially those that are consumer facing, demographics are important for product development. This was certainly the case for me in more than one organization…so having focus groups with relevant demograohic groups LED BY DIFFERENT scientific/marketing teams got to the answers needed in a safe environment. NOW we all know the potential pitfalls of a “led” focus group, but when used as a stimulator and not final arbiter of ideas, it makes a difference.

Miles Hutchings, Head of Business Development, North America, Intertek Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals
Without knowing the background and culture of the organization, my experience has been that the frustration described below is often associated with “if I have a new idea will it be taken seriously; will anything happen with it; is it more work in addition to  my current role?” In order to address these points it is important that the creativity team members are reassured that their ideas will be taken seriously and to convey that there is a process to evaluate and  progress their ideas to conclusion. Some members may have concerns that if they have a new idea then this could result in more work for them in addition to their current responsibilities. This is often the case with cross functional teams where there are various reporting lines and the various functions represented in the team have their own objectives that usually take priority.  Again, this has to be addressed up front by stating what resources will be applied to evaluate and progress new ideas and to have the various department managers support the cross functional initiative by making it a part of their direct reports’ objectives. I think it’s important to get to bottom of the barriers to moving forward……

One approach could be to administer an anonymous survey where questions such as: “What do you see as the principal role of the CFIT?” ; “What barriers are there that the CFIT needs to overcome to be effective?” ; “What recommendations would you suggest to overcome these barriers?” etc. These are some thoughts I have and I am prepared to discuss my experiences in this field, if appropriate.

Donald H. Piehl, Ph.D., IRI Emeritus Member
I taught creativity development to both technical and general business audiences.  To me the most important point to emphasize is that everyone can be creative and tap into that innate power.  I liked to use fun drills and games that demonstrate that is true.  However, not all people have the same creative capacity.  After interviewing hundreds of job applicants, I always asked each person if they thought they were creative.  Most people would hesitate to respond.  However, the truly creative said yes immediately, knew they were creative, and later proved it.

Bruce Merrifield, IRI Emeritus Member
We tend to remain captive of a couple of mindsets which we inherited from the Industrial Revolution  200+ years ago. One of these is “if we don’t own it, we can’t control it,” and the other is “in our company, we do everything ourselves. Well, we now have an explosion of entrpreneurial initiatives “out there” in every industry and we no longer really have to internally generate all the new growth opportunities we desire.

Fortuitously, you’re business is involved in one of the great rising tides of history. It is marked by massive droughts now emerging in almost every country in the world…across Northern India, in China (now importing corn and soybeans etc. for the first time), in Australia (not the flood area), in Russia, in Peru, Chili, and Brazil in South America, in Africa (most of the livestock in Somalia have already died of starvation) and even in our S.W. USA where Lake Mead has dropped seriously and is still dropping…its waters feed Los Angeles). There is an important reason for this, and it is not a temporary phenomen, but a long term exponentially-rising tide of demand for food to feed some 6.7 billion people, 80% in underdeveloped  developing countries.

These spreading droughts currently are accelerating demand for fertilizers, drought resistant crops, food machinery, hydroponics etc. (every area of your industry). Moreover, there are creative developments emerging in every one of these areas. The opportunity is to search out, screen and joint venture with those that are synergistic with your capabilities. 

The Limited Liabilty Corporation (LLC) developed by The Commerce Department in the 1980’s has become the dominant form for U.S. incorporation and is specifically designed for this type of collaboration.  

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